Usenet

Old-timers might argue the Internet was freest during the Usenet days.

I remember the Usenet days.

And as the Carnegie Mellon study is careful to point out, pornographic image files, despite their evident popularity, represent only about 3% of all the messages on the Usenet newsgroups, while the Usenet itself represents only 11.5% of the traffic on the Internet.

Flames are, unfortunately, a fact of USENET life. It's a rare USENET regular who hasn't been shaken to the foundations with anger at something some jerk has posted.

Back when I first started using USENET, you couldn't use it unless you were 18+ : no dial-up accounts then, only students, professors and corporate types. The invasion of the dial-up accounts in the 90's and the comparisons with the new terms at Uni's/Colleges - forming the basis of "the never ending September" phrase :-(

One man I exchanged e-mail with, an engineer for Ford, said "I'd personally be LOST without USENET. Not so much the alt groups (although I DO lurk in several groups there) as the comp.* hierarchy. I've turned down jobs where I couldn't get unrestricted Net-access. Comp.unix.* and comp.lang.* have saved many a project for me.[…]"

To this end, Jabby attempts to xpost across USENET, telling rape victims that Evolution says that 'rape is good', telling depressed teenagers that suicide is good, telling war refugees that the fact that they got hammered shows that they are Not Fit, etc. Jabby also wants to create the Manpanzee, a human-chimp xbreed.

1. The FAQ points out that USENET is not what it used to be before the Never Ending September. Third party cancelling used to be sternly looked down upon. Spam, floods, gibberish, have changed the scene.

We actually had seats in the last two rows at the third level, so we didn't annoy anybody, or else we would have been told. We had enough room, space, we enjoyed it and we were ok. Not any idiot who spits hatred all over the USENET, like some of you guys, sings well, unannoyingly.

You seem to be missing the point that you have failed to convince anyone that what you propose IS an improvement. As you already mentioned, change != progress/improvement. USENET has been around awhile now and the accepted rules are pretty much the result of eliminating things thta didn't work well.