[zeveb]

> In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums.

I wouldn't call Usenet groups 'primitive online discussion forums'; indeed, I rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better & more advanced than current technologies.

It was fast. How fast? Really, really fast: every article was already sitting on your local system, so there was no network lag (or just LAN lag, if your local system was on a network). Articles were plain ASCII text: no ads, no images, no JavaScript. The combination of local articles & small articles wins over web pages every day of the week.

It was easy to find stuff. While the system was distributed across the world, there was a nice, neat hierarchy. This wins over the Web, which needs a service like Google to be usable. If one wanted to, one could perform full-text search over the entire newsfeed in realtime (James 'Kibo" Parry was famous for this). Imagine being able to grep the Internet!

It was decentralised: you could get multiple newsfeeds from multiple sources. You could have site-local newsgroups if you wanted to, or just share certain groups with your peers.

It had killfiles. It's hard to express, nowadays, how valuable these were. And you were in control, not some unaccountable moderator.

A 21st-century version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people, would be just awesome.

Web forums are a primitive version of Usenet.

[tptacek]

It was "fast" in the sense you refer to as because it was batshit: every ISP and Usenet provider was forced to keep a copy of every public message everybody was reading. In its heyday, running a market-competitive Usenet server strained commercial storage technology (running an actually-competitive Usenet server required custom software engineering), and that was with a userbase a fraction of the size of Reddit.

Of course, it was incredibly slow in a more important sense: the latency with which you'd see responses to your messages. Your reply had to propagate through the network of Usenet peering relationships before your counterparty could see it. Contrast that to "primitive" web message boards, where that propagation is instantaneous.

But, most importantly: because everyone was keeping a replicated log of everything anyone had ever sent, almost nobody had archives. The only way to read old forum messages was to... wait for it... go to a web application like DejaNews.

Software piracy killed Usenet --- binaries made it impossible for a typical provider (of any sort) to provide full-feed Usenet, which is what customers demanded, and so everyone gradually migrated to centralized providers. But even if that hadn't happened, Reddit would have killed Usenet eventually.

(I ran a Freenix-ranked Usenet server in the 1990s for a mid-sized regional ISP, in part by independently inventing the INN history cache; my love for NNTP is deep and real.)

[grkvlt]

I think there's some rose-coloured reviewing going on here.

> It was fast [...] easy [...] you were in control [etc.]

Not that I recall. It was slow, and could take from hours (local organisation or same city) to days (rest of the world) for an article to be propagated on Usenet. Yes, it was all cached locally, but often systems would download new articles only once a day, often at night when bandwidth (scarce and expensive, costing 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars' as the rn warning went) was available. Conversations didn't take place in anything near real-time, but over days.

It didn't have history, or archives, either. Binary newsgroups would be kept for days only (due to their size) while the 'alt' hierarchy was kept for longer and the 'big 7' longest (eventually multiple years, but originally only months, causing the loss of many early Usenet postings that were never archived.)

As for moderation and accountability, moderated newsgroups were controlled by people who could choose whether or not to accept articles, and the creation of a new group, even in the 'alt' hierarchy was at the whim of some news administrator, while the 'big 7' required the 'Usenet Cabal' to agree, after a voting process that while democratic was complex and confusing.

Actually getting access to a group required your local news administrator to decide whether it was worth the disk space and bandwidth, so there was no guarantee that you would see every group or message.

As for full-text search over the entire newsfeed, Kibo was famous for this because it was rare. Searching news was difficult and time and compute resource hungry; most people did not have the resources to accomplish this.

The Web is a "version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people" plus interactivity, colour, images, video, hypertext, programmable extensibility, you name it...

[nils-m-holm]

Usenet was lightyears ahead of any web forum I have seen so far! Decentralized, independent, and offering reader software that still has no match in the world of WWW forums. I have downloaded news batches at 1200 baud and would still want to do this to get those advantages back!

Since the web forums have taken over, I have no place to go any longer, except for HN, but even this feels like a drag compared to the elegance of Usenet.