Around 1990 or '91, a.r.s. was available on the military site where I had a UNIX shell account. The text description in the text newsreader was "He's Dead, Jim." It eventually made a paradigm shift possible for me away from fence sitting, which ESMB continued in many ways. A major difference is that a.r.s. was unmoderated, which is where the "alt" hierarchy differed from other USENET newsgroups. It was possible to "shout people down" by piling on, shaming or bullying, outing the anonymous posters, etc., yet it took the OSA minion many years to refine their techniques to the point where some can be effective at levels of disruption that the crude Kobrin cancellation message against a.r.s. pales in comparison to.Way back in the dark ages of the interwebs, before Google, even before AMAZON, there was a newsgroup called "ARS" (short for, alt-religion-scientology).
Lots of people found each other there, some good inside information was shared, and the critical community grew.
Then OSA stepped in, and started trolling the site. Valuable threads were derailed or outnumbered, generally with nonsense. The signal-to-noise ratio became less bearable, detracting would-be readers from returning to ARS.
Will this be allowed to be the fate of ESMB?
Effective moderation takes willing volunteers who understand what they are looking at. There need to be enforceable rules which are agreed upon by posters. Typically a complex rule set eventually falls by the wayside (and here I am speaking from the viewpoint of a former moderator on several less volatile boards who walked away from the role) and can drift into vendetta and bias. It is damn hard to be fair and ESMB has mostly succeeded for longer than I would have predicted.