I agree that moderation policies are important. But I think it's missing a point to decide that "A social network with bad moderation policies" is therefore not a social network.
Easy comparison: Mastadon has distributed identity, and localized management of moderation. Is this sufficient that we should deem it "not a social network"? I think not.
I think there was no real consensus in USENET towards the appropriate degree of moderation, rather several standing waves of opinion. All the species of technically simple moderation patterns were present there: A species of subscriber,
or every message approved (basically only a radically small set of approved posters) and so on. Since some of the newsgroups are functionally archives of mailing lists, there's a whole additional universe of moderation techniques applied "upstream".
>All the species of technically simple moderation patterns were present there
I consider voting (allowing readers to upvote and downvote, which is extremely quick and easy compared to writing a comment) an important technically simple moderation pattern, and I'd be very surprised to learn the voting on Usenet articles was ever possible.
>Mastadon has distributed identity, and localized management of moderation. Is this sufficient that we should deem it "not a social network"? I think not.
Good point. Something created for the explicit purpose of competing with (in the sense of taking users away from) a social network should be called a social network.
Easy comparison: Mastadon has distributed identity, and localized management of moderation. Is this sufficient that we should deem it "not a social network"? I think not.
I think there was no real consensus in USENET towards the appropriate degree of moderation, rather several standing waves of opinion. All the species of technically simple moderation patterns were present there: A species of subscriber, or every message approved (basically only a radically small set of approved posters) and so on. Since some of the newsgroups are functionally archives of mailing lists, there's a whole additional universe of moderation techniques applied "upstream".