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"?
@sp A comparison to IRC, mailing lists, or even Web forums would also hold I think.
@jkb I was thinking particularly of Usenet because of the issues of propagating articles around and retaining them in a meaningful order