[goatinaboat]

You couldn't typically delete a Usenet post either.

In the early days of Usenet posts were ephemeral and would only last a week. That expectation was baked into the culture and everyone was surprised to find a sneaky organisation had been archiving it all to monetise later.

[ghaff]

Maybe in the very early days. But there were various archives of many newsgroups pre-Web (much less pre-DejaNews and Google).

[goatinaboat]

Yes lots of groups had their FAQs for example on an FTP site, but ordinary posts weren’t typically archived