When I got involved in the early 90s, sci.math (to name a random example) had over 100,000 regular readers. Participants ran the range from beginners who didn't understand Calculus to tenured professors to random kooks. (Sometimes those categories overlapped - eg Alexander Abian.) Conversations regularly were complex meandering affairs where participants frequently kept 3-6 different threads of the same conversation going in the same posts.
I am not aware of any discussion forum today that is online with anything like that readership and range of participants. I'm also not aware of any with that tolerance for complex conversations. (You can do it with email - I have - but when people mix top posting with bottom posting with interleaved posting, it turns into a mess. To do it like Usenet did you must use interleaved posting.)
The more important qualifier is "from time to time".
What I miss most about Usenet is that there were always interesting conversations, that were expected to take place over time. Here how many conversations are still going on a day later? A week later?
When I got involved in the early 90s, sci.math (to name a random example) had over 100,000 regular readers. Participants ran the range from beginners who didn't understand Calculus to tenured professors to random kooks. (Sometimes those categories overlapped - eg Alexander Abian.) Conversations regularly were complex meandering affairs where participants frequently kept 3-6 different threads of the same conversation going in the same posts.
I am not aware of any discussion forum today that is online with anything like that readership and range of participants. I'm also not aware of any with that tolerance for complex conversations. (You can do it with email - I have - but when people mix top posting with bottom posting with interleaved posting, it turns into a mess. To do it like Usenet did you must use interleaved posting.)