I miss kill files
I used to love usenet. The technology for connecting people and allowing them to talk has moved on quite a bit since then, but there was one thing that usenet had that I have rarely seen in it sucessors- the killfile.
Moderation caught on and moderation can be found everywhere, but the idea of the kill file was to my mind a more subtile social contorl and one that I think strikes a better balance between allowing people in the community to express themselves and allowing people to control what expression they are exposed to.
If you have not used one a kill file is a simple script that would strip out comments by posters whose name you put in your file. Not that different from moderation except for the key point that you personally got to decide who you wished to ignore. It ment that the community had no gatekeeper but that everyone was free to and able to shunn people who did not learn to behave and do so quickly.
You did have the problem of learning who to ignore in a new community but it was not uncommon for a person who was invited to a new community to be given a few key sugggestions on names for the kill file.
I wish that more community sites would go from the gatekeeper model which so often results in petty dictors to the shunning approach which lets you crowdsource who is a jerk.