I would add another important point: earlier, there was nothing like NNTP. So when someone showed you "the Internet", they showed you email, gopher (later the web), IRC and so on. These were separate services with unique features. The appearance of CGI and dynamically generated content was a big revolution at that time. Then, everything converged in the web, and when Google took over the newsgroups, there was practically zero incentive for new Internet users even learn what NNTP was.

Yup, all those. Also, at least for me:

- it was slow

- it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order

- it was text only (essentially)

- posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)

A significant part of the culture was that Usenet was tied, almost exclusively, to selective-admission universities (and largely CompSci / EE students and faculty), a few high-tech companies (infotech and defence, largely), and a few government departments. Those institutions could exert reasonable disciplinary control over Usenet participants ... enough to avoid the grosser harms.

Yes, it was highly exclusive and exclusionary, and there were definitely toxic elements to the culture, but it wasn't entirely lacking in control or discipline as occurred later.

Note that Usenet did have some effective spam controls ("Cancelmoose", the Lumber Cabal, etc.), but overall effectiveness was limited by virtue of the distributed and noncentralised nature of the protocol, as well as the lack of any true participant authentication.

Slashdot was harshing on Usenet long before Reddit was, and various online forums (as you mention) before that.

There was more to it.

1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds

2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty

3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributors of the groups. When you searched for posts by someone, the first 100 pages were from these troll bots

> The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds

News clients were built into most email clients and were pretty user friendly. I dont think you needed to be a nerd to use it. Web forums were also pretty ugly in the late 90s.

I agree. Windows 9x included Outlook Express which had a built in news reader in addition to mail. If you could setup your mail you could also setup the news reader.

I think most of the ISPs that I used either had a setup program that configured it automatically along with mail/dns, or provided clear instructions on how to set it up manually.

I may be in the minority, but I actually liked Outlook Express.

* * *

Also:

It was insecure, there was no trust model and no encryption, so no proof of authorship, no proof of server identity.

It was too public. Not everyone wants their conversations out in the open.

Whilst authentication was generally lacking, PGP was available and tended to be used for, e.g., security announcements.

Not widely adopted, of course.

This is the correct answer. Since it was a "permissionless publish" system, with no authentication, anyone could post anything. This was a disaster in the way that pure free speech systems always are.

(To some extent, there was a natural response in that anyone could cancel anything, although those ended up adding authentication. At one point people estimated that a third of traffic was spam and another third was "spam cancels".)

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html (1998!)

It was always "permissionless publish", but it is worth remembering that it wasn't a free speech system (until alt.*) Each group had a manifest of rules.

I think that the issue was that the enforcement mechanisms were largely social, so they broke down when it grew too large, especially when ISPs and others started running servers without engaging in the community.

> 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.

Precisely. Usenet's "regulars" back in those days were generally IT staffers, with perhaps a professor or three, at any given school, or were IT staffers running news servers at their companies. The regular September flood of new kids discovering Usenet at school was annoying, but manageable.

Then the gates were thrown open wide, and netiquette got crushed under the weight of the general public. Once the crooks and con artists discovered it, it was the beginning of the end.

If you were to ask Usenet at the time, they would chiefly cite the eternal September (which you do mention in your article), although, clearly, it kept going for longer than that. Perhaps the eternal September is just one of the contributing factors to losing control of its shared culture and values?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Usenet as the principle locus of online group discussion phased out ... within a few years of the Eternal September. I'd argue that the shine was clearly off somewhere in the 1997--1999 timeline, which is roughly when the first discussion sites such as Slashdot emerged.

Transitions aren't instantaneous, and aren't always clearly visible at the time. (Look at, say, the present ... evolution ... of Birdsite, The Front Page of the Internet, and the StackExchange empire.) But in retrospect inflection points become more clear.

(This is pretty much a constant in all of history, with eras, transitions, and labeling of these coming years, occasionally centuries, after the events themselves.)

The Eternal September was one of a growing onslaught of insults to Usenet which it ultimately succumbed to. Not instantly, but in time, and inevitably.