[mhd]

I think the two major factors that brought down Usenet are the focus on the web (i.e. most users not knowing that the WWW isn't the whole of the internet) and spam, loads of spam.

The weird thing is that mail actually managed to survive both.

I always wished that at least the NNTP protocol would prove to be more resilient. It would be a great secondary entry point for basically any online forum, similar to what RSS does for news feeds. Give me nntp://news.ycombinator.com, so that I could read and post via GNUS/Thunderbird/tin…

[coroxout]

Occasionally I browse HN in lynx, and pressing g followed by entering news.ycombinator.com (or any other hostname beginning with "news." and not prefixed with a protocol type) results in lynx trying to do exactly that: looking for nntp://news.ycombinator.com...

But yes, having it for real and being able to browse in a properly-threaded netnews client, hide subthreads you don't care for, and never have to click on "More" only to see "Unknown or expired link" because you took too long to read the first n messages - these would all be great, plus extra geek cred.