People see Usenet and the wide-open access to all. What they fail to see, especially for its crucial first formative decade (1980-1990) was the very formidable gates that did exist: institutional access through selective research universities, and a handful of tech firms and government agencies.

It was a bit like Disneyland's legendary E-Ticket -- once inside the gates you could wander freely and sample at will. But there was a price to be paid to enter: technical ability, inclination, and most of all access to the institutions. Those institutions also provided a brake on some of the worse forms of abusive behaviour -- individuals could be identified, sanctioned, and removed from the system. The small number of site administrators (initially literally a handful, later still capable of fitting within a single conference room or lecture hall) also reflected a balance of centralisation and decentralisation which seemed to mostly work.

Much of what was good and bad about Usenet derived from these gatekeepers, and that is a point very often missed in subsequent treatments or discussions.