forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins.
"forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins."
Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then.
No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client.
Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users.
Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.
What killed USENET was the lack of moderation. And also spam.
Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant.
But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and wandered off elsewhere.
Moderation and spam filtering also sucked. Yeah, you could have kill files, but that had to be done by everyone independently. It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in.
"USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot."
We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago.
"It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in."
Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated.
I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.
forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins.
oh, the good old days.