I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has.
Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.
I love this idea, but at the same time I think it is not feasible. Back then, there were no economic or even political benefits of being able to join an online community. These days, economic and political reasons are major driving factors of either controlling or infiltrating communities, so there will always be a cat-and-mouse game between insincere actors and moderators. This would be especially true on non-technical communities, although I have seen some pop up over Signal through word of mouth.
On the technical side, it’s probably a lot easier to gatekeep, but even HN has degraded significantly since its early days. Lobster.rs is the only truly technical one that has kept that spirit (to this day I am still not a member, which kind of proves its gatekeeping abilities hah).
Yeah, it's not a technical thing. It's that the unwashed didn't have access/weren't even aware. Sure, you can do the same thing today given explicit gatekeeping and moderation.
I guess that aspect can't really be replicated anymore. Back when information moved slowly (in person, telephone, print) and broadcasts only included things with mass appeal (TV/radio ads, etc.) knowledge of a small but high quality community would remain tight for a long time, growing slowly. But the cat's out of the bag now: even the most obscure thing only needs to be posted in some place with tons of eyeballs (which simply could not occur at scale back in the day), if it's good it's upvoted to the top, and immediately it's no longer obscure.
I remember having to resort to submitting a post to alt.tech-support.recovery using a text editor and a raw telnet session due to the "lay-an-egg" requirement for posts to be accepted there and I didn't have software that would let me fiddle with headers in a sane fashion. HN most certainly does not achieve this level of filtration.
I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuff.
To post to a moderated group, you would add an "Approved" header to your post before submitting. The content of the header was not important, just the presence.
Equally fun, your "From" address (just another header) was also under your control.
So it was fairly trivial to post articles From: anyone, Approved: yes.
In this way, it was pretty similar to SMTP email in the same era. Before EHLO and reverse lookups and server identification and SPF and DKIM and DMARC and spam filters and universal skepticism, email was simple to spoof.
Now, the readers of USENET at the time were also pretty savvy, and there were other noneditable headers attached to your message that might betray your malfeasance. If you were posting to a newsgroup that didn't permit such activity (there were some that encouraged/required it!), you might earn an angry email sent to your news administrator, who was generally connected to the authority structure (university or employer) and had little patience for your juvenile behaviour.
It worked really well.
...until it didn't! But I don't think this "problem" was a meaningful contributor to the decline of USENET.
Interesting that the content off the Approved header didn't matter. I'm only familiar with Mailman's use of same, where the content has to be the moderator's password: incorrect is equivalent to not providing the header, and correct bypasses the moderation queue. Either way, it gets scrubbed immediately, for secrecy. Essentially, it's just to let listserv moderators send to a list without having to spend time using the queue for their own messages, or automation of any sort such as custom smtp client apps.
Ah, I'd forgotten about the similarity to Mailman's moderation. Right, that works because there's a centralized approval gateway (the mailman code on the mail server) which can also strip out the secret before distributing the message to the list members.
Since NetNews had no central authority, every news server had to judge the validity of posts for themselves. And obviously they couldn't all know the moderator secret without it leaking immediately. Nowadays we'd have a moderator cryptographically sign the message contents. Actually this should have been possible back then too (RSA in 1977 plus a public key published in the newsgroup definition which already held the moderator email address?), but it was not used.
Newsreaders did not show the Approved header. People often stuck fun or funny stuff in there, like easter eggs for those who knew to look.
I know alt.hackers had a similar rule, and even had a testbed group (alt.hackers.test?) you could use to see if you had figured it out without polluting the main feed with test posts.
The FAQ hint was "it's moderated with no moderator". Everything else was up to you.
Man you're asking a lot here. I've had at least three concussions and the tail end of my drug use between when this was a thing and now. I cannot recall the exact specifics but what I do remember was that to get a post accepted to the group you had to include a custom x-header (name escapes me). The contents of that header could be anything, it didn't matter, the presence of the non-standard extra header was what was checked. The best part of it all was nobody, literally no one, would tell aspiring new members how to post to the group. There was the vaguest of hints dropped in the group FAQ and that was it. You could post if you could figure out how to post.
Except whoever made Google Groups (and bought out and shut down DejaNews for it) got their promotion and lost interest and so Usenet For The Unwashed Masses got nixed like so many other Google products.
Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.