Back when I was active on Usenet it was considered pretty normal to have house rules for any newsgroup, you were also expected to refrain from posting long enough to notice and learn the unspoken customs (this was called "lurking").
Nowadays people see it as an orchestrated attack against free speech, shout references to 1984, and threaten to move elsewhere.
Yet the ones asking us all to behave politely are called "hypersensitive"?
@jkb yes! I can't imagine what the birdsite trolls and facebookers would have done in the face of the rules for some of the forums I was on in the early 00s.
Like, manual account approval, heavy banhammer, strict content rules (including minimum length of post, style, etc)
That was considered normal. Some places were kinder about it than others, but serious deviation was cut down quickly.
