[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/