[wazoox]

We had something really great back then: Usenet. We used it much like most people use social media nowadays I guess, talking about stuff, sharing images, etc

Usenet even allows noting threads, blacklisting users, etc. But not controlled by any single company... I miss Usenet.

[bluedino]

I'm going to get down-voted into oblivion, but I never saw the love for Usenet. Sure, every topic under the sun was covered and anyone could access it, but it was far from perfect.

Impossible to search until things like DejaNews came along

Even going back a few months was a huge PITA on slower connections

Your ISP might not have carried every newsgroup, or it might update very slowly

I never cared much for mailing lists either, but at least many of them had a search interface that worked well.

For all the problems that web-based bulletin boards had, they were a huge improvement over Usenet. Much easier to use and faster to browse through. You can argue that if you want to, but they were adopted so much faster.

[ArkyBeagle]

Dejanews was a mistake. Searchability is a mistake. Social stuff should be a message-space, not an archive. It should be ephemeral; if you want persistence, build a webpage or store the messages off locally.

I've only used Netscape/Seamonkey, and it was much faster on Usenet than any Web interface.

Usenet was a vast improvement over everything that followed.

[Scuds]

> Much easier to use and faster to browse through. You can argue that if you want to, but they were adopted so much faster.

I guess it comes down to tree vs flat structures for a thread.

> Your ISP might not have carried every newsgroup, or it might update very slowly. They're great in non-public/academic settings. Back in 2001 most of the CompSci classes had their TA - student interactions on a newsgroup.

Thing is, this is a 200 people at the most working on the same thing. There is no casual 'shooting the shit' on these groups.

> Impossible to search until things like DejaNews came along I'll admit, centralized Search as a feature is something that was sorely missing. FAQs were created to try and mitigate common questions, but you're still depending on one person to maintain all of it, and this is before Wiki software.

http://www.faqs.org/usenet/

[wtbob]

On the contrary, Usenet was very fast when used as intended, from a local news feed. Indeed, it'd work even were the network down.

Web forums took off because users wanted to use browsers for everything, and ad-supported had lower barriers to use than subscription-based.

[ArkyBeagle]

People also started downloading binaries in earnest, which made ISPs want to get rid of the NNTP server.

[snowwrestler]

I think you're right, but the point is that before web forums ever existed, Usenet was a very popular application on the Internet. To leave it out of a snapshot of 1996 is a big omission.

[krapp]

>Usenet even allows noting threads, blacklisting users, etc. But not controlled by any single company...

Because it relied on third party clients, which have more or less been replaced by everything being done in the browser and the closed black box that is a "website".

Although I suppose you could still do that with a site which provides an API, or some kind of official set of browser plugins but the experience probably wouldn't be the same.