Abstract
Internet e-mail was conceived in a different world than we live in today. It was a small, tightly knit community, and we didn’t really have to worry too much about miscreants. Generally, if someone did something wrong, the problem could be dealt with through social means; “shunning” is very effective in small communities. Perhaps we should have figured out what was going to happen when Usenet started to go bad. Usenet was based on an inexpensive network called UUCP, which was fairly easy to join, so it gave us a taste of what happens when the community becomes larger and more distributed—and harder to manage. Even the worst flame wars seemed fairly innocuous in the grand scheme of things, and kill files were really enough, but there was a seed of something ominous that was going to germinate all too soon.
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