The features that you are talking about are essential for carrying on extended, complex conversations in a high volume environment.
The high volume discussion forums that we have today are mostly geared towards providing and filtering discussions of topical items for short periods of time, while blocking spam. (Not a big problem on the classic Usenet.)
The result is that we have things like voting systems, but the implicit assumption that any old conversation is automatically dead. (An assumption that is implicitly guaranteed by the fact that the forum becomes unusable.) So that leads to lack of motivation to improve software for this use case.
Yeah, tell me about it - I poked in here more or less by accident (tab still open) and found your reply. Everyone else is long gone, of course.
You're right about topicality being important, but there are tons of forums which I've followed (on history, for example, or on science) where nothing is topical and threads go on for 140 phpBB pages or more. Needless to say, these threads are unusable, especially compared to Usenet. So why not make software for it? People write software for more obscure niches all the time.
The features that you are talking about are essential for carrying on extended, complex conversations in a high volume environment.
The high volume discussion forums that we have today are mostly geared towards providing and filtering discussions of topical items for short periods of time, while blocking spam. (Not a big problem on the classic Usenet.)
The result is that we have things like voting systems, but the implicit assumption that any old conversation is automatically dead. (An assumption that is implicitly guaranteed by the fact that the forum becomes unusable.) So that leads to lack of motivation to improve software for this use case.