> Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
That’s nostalgia - the BBS world, Usenet, IRC, etc. absolutely had norms and people who violated them were routinely blocked. Where I grew up there were some BBSes run by e.g. evangelical Christians who aggressively restricted the FidoNet channels they carried and the files allowed to be uploaded, and later some of the business-focused ISPs sharply limited things like Usenet (which had its own moderation system). When I ran a FidoNet node, I had to agree to community standards with the boards I peered with because the operators didn’t want to deal with certain types of hassle.
What was different is federation: back in the early online era, someone who was booted off of one system would go somewhere else. The problem with services like Twitter is that they’re centralized and so when people break their terms of service don’t want to go somewhere else, so they complain about censorship when they really mean “free hosting and promotion”.
That’s nostalgia - the BBS world, Usenet, IRC, etc. absolutely had norms and people who violated them were routinely blocked. Where I grew up there were some BBSes run by e.g. evangelical Christians who aggressively restricted the FidoNet channels they carried and the files allowed to be uploaded, and later some of the business-focused ISPs sharply limited things like Usenet (which had its own moderation system). When I ran a FidoNet node, I had to agree to community standards with the boards I peered with because the operators didn’t want to deal with certain types of hassle.
What was different is federation: back in the early online era, someone who was booted off of one system would go somewhere else. The problem with services like Twitter is that they’re centralized and so when people break their terms of service don’t want to go somewhere else, so they complain about censorship when they really mean “free hosting and promotion”.