Traditional usenet clients were the most efficient discussion software in terms of usability. Everything since then (web forums, Slack-like clients, Discord, HN, etc.) has been a step backwards. That’s very much substance in my book.
I’d argue in terms of usability, todays platforms are an improvement. You can just look at pure user counts and see they are more usable/accessible overall than usernet (or irc for that matter) ever was. Discord, for example, is easy enough to learn that millions of non-technical users have been able to hop on and start using it.
Perhaps you’re thinking of efficiency in terms of screen/white space or CLI workflows over GUI workflows.
> You can just look at pure user counts and see they are more usable/accessible overall
User counts are a poor comparison when you consider how much the pool of potential users has grown.
As points to reference, Microsoft Windows 95 sold 7 million copies in its first 5 weeks so call it ~73 million copies sold the first year.[0]
20 years later in 2015, Samsung, Apple, and Huawei combined sold ~73 million phones across 5 models.[1] Windows 10, released that same year, had Microsoft shooting for it installed on 1 billion devices within 3 years.[2]
2005 estimates 1 billion (or 16% of the global population) online. 2020 estimates 4.9 billion (or 63% of the global population) online.[3] A million users used to be a big deal not that long ago.[4]
Not that I disagree we've gotten better at some things but Outlook Express (newsgroups) and mIRC (irc) seemed plenty accessible to millions of non-technical users.
> Not that I disagree we've gotten better at some things but Outlook Express (newsgroups) and mIRC (irc) seemed plenty accessible to millions of non-technical users.
This was my experience as well decades ago. Unfortunately, people claim that Usenet and/or irc are to technical for the average user to figure out. I guess the skill level of the average user has gone down in the interim.
Clients like Free Agent had a three-pane design that preceded iTunes' by years and I wouldn't doubt was the inspiration for its layout. New users today would feel right at home with it.
Forte Agent was the only reason that I had a windows PC in the mid/late 90s. Yep an IXer posting with Agent may have made me the butt of the joke, but that was some of the most intuitive software ever written.
Improvement in user counts? I'll give you that.
Improvement in the quality of discussion? Not so much. It isn't a coincindence that we're discussing this here and not somewhere on discord.
One important Usenet feature that enables efficient tracking of and participation in discussion is that read/unread status is tracked per posting. (See my related comment in the sibling subthread.) That kind-of requires keyboard navigation to make it practical (e.g. press Tab to jump to the next unread posting, which then automatically becomes read). But keyboard navigation by itself also tends to maximize usability for frequent/regular users, which I'd argue are the important demographics for discussion forums.
One issue is with mobile UI, where there's really no good way to make per-posting read/unread status practical with just touch (and/or voice) input. But I'd also argue that asynchronous discussions (as opposed to chats/IM) are best performed on desktop. On mobile they will always remain a compromise in usability and content quality.
When a community I'm part of moved from Usenet to a forum around 2007, I remember a few technical points that persuaded members, mainly easier moderation and post editing.
One troll in a community of 200 has an outsized impact.
One Usenet killer feature that was lost in web forums is the per-post read/unread status, which made long-running subthreads manageable, decoupling them from each other. In web forums you only have "up to page xy" read/unread status, which forces participants to follow threads linearly and thus decreases asynchronicity and makes parallel subthreads hard to follow.
