Usenet died due to spam. Newsgroups were unmoderated by default, and moderation wasn’t built into the protocol. Then PHP web forums took over because they were discoverable by web search and only required the web browser that you had anyway. They also added support for popular features like posting images and using emoticons graphics, instead of only text (though the latter hasn’t hurt HN).

We may distinguish between USENET the public network that is part of the Internet (considerd "out of date" by many because it is not Web based, and indeed suffering from spam) and the USENET protocol, which you can use to set up your private version of USENET-like discussion groups.

In fact, many organizations had (and some still may have) inhouse groups, often prefixed "local." e.g. "local.events", "local.jokes" etc.

Advantage: threaded discussions, open standard (many existing open source readers e.g. Emacs: M-x gnus)

> Usenet died due to spam. Newsgroups were unmoderated by default, and moderation wasn’t built into the protocol.

Doesn't that make Usenet unfit for complex public discussions, at least?

It worked quite well with a mostly-academia audience. For the general public, of course, moderation is indispensable. The spam in Usenet began when businesses and scammers discovered Usenet. My point in the root comment is that Usenet clients contained all the ingredients for efficient, structured, long-running, deep discussion, and those are orthogonal to moderation, which you nowadays need in any case.

The problem with Usenet style interfaces isn't just spam, it's low value comments. Comment voting somewhat solves this but most people vote based upon how much they agree rather than the comment's discussion value.

This should be solved by moderation when necessary, like in traditional web forums. I agree that voting is a bad mechanism, because people then start posting for likes and reaction stats, and also involuntarily judge posts by their like count instead of only by their own judgement. Flagging/reporting to moderators is fine.

I'm not sure moderation is that much better. Some moderators strive to be fair but the majority will still vote and moderate based on preferences. There's also the quantity issue, most low-value comments don't break any rules but also aren't very insightful.

It really depends on the community. You can certainly have rules against low-value or one-sentence comments. Here on HN you can get banned if you post too many low-value comments, it doesn’t need voting for that.

I haven’t seen the lack of voting to be a major problem in newsgroups or traditional web forums. But I’ve come to despise the prevalent dynamics of liking/voting in newer platforms.

Slashdot solved this (arguably) by having you classify comments as "interesting", "funny", and several other categories, rather than plain up/down. Although Slashdot failed here by mapping these categories to a single score.

I would argue that Usenet died due to binaries, not spam. Binaries were what made it untenable for independent ISPs to run full-feed Usenet, which sent people who cared about Usenet to third-party centralized services, which destroyed incentives for independent shops to attempt to run Usenet.

These systems were developed before unsolicited commercial promotions started flooding these mediums, later, automation made it worse.

Most people don't want to have truth-seeking complex discussions because it's hard and boring.

Hard, boring, and a social liability.

There's a lot of truth to be found out there that is useful, technical, and utterly devoid of public attention.

But if the truth-seeking you're thinking of is being a culture war truther, that'd certainly explain the woes.

A lot of technical issues are very controversial.

It can be difficult to discuss inside an enterprise because everyone’s already so committed to a particular solution.

People have very strong opinions about crypto, SPAs, and CDNs.

It can be difficult to discuss technical issues inside an enterprise, but if it turns into a social liability, either you enterprise culture is extraordinarily corrosive to the soul, or what you're doing is culture war.

The words they used are social liability, not merely controversial. It's a pretty high bar for how wrong a discussion in an enterprise has to go that it turns into a social liability.

Maybe they're thinking about what they said, which is seeking out truth about issues that happen to be thrown around in culture war?

Anyway, you don't have to go all the way there for knowledge to become a social liability. The more you understand about the universe and the human world - hell, the more permission to think you give yourself - the more you realize just how much utter bullshit regular people believe about everything. Homeopathy, weird coaching stuff, fitness and dieting and cosmetics. This supplement will help your health, that fruit will stop some ailment, looking at a microwave when it's cooking will ruin your eyes, etc. Most of this bullshit is fed by content marketers, through magazines, shows, radio, podcasts, and social media.

I have a whole rant about ethics of advertising, but that's for another day; point here is: it doesn't take much truth-seeking before it gets incredibly cringe to talk with most people. You either let them keep believing in bullshit and suffer inside, or speak up and end up being pushed out of the group.

It's kind of boring at the beginning while you figure out where people are coming from, but if you do it genuinely and openmindedly, it's bound to get interesting.

Especially if the mob and/or government begin to want to "cancel" you.

No-one has found a funding model that works for it.

Disproved by subscription-based www.cix.co.uk.

I don't see anything about Usenet service on there. More generally, while a few people are willing to pay for access to a discussion service, most aren't and it's not clear that the people who are are a big enough market to be viable.

I was referring to the paradigm but sorry yes you are right the parent was specifically about usenet.

> More generally, while a few people are willing to pay for access to a discussion service, most aren't

Agreed.

No need for anyone to still have their own artisanally bespoke thoughts on "why": the reasons for the decline of Usenet are well-documented and easily found. It's a fascinating part of internet history worth reading up on.

Eternal September lowered the average quality of Usenet content, but it’s not what ultimately lead to its demise. I actually only started using Usenet around the mid-90s, and continued for a good decade. The problem later was spam, and web forums being much more discoverable, and somewhat easier to get started with, so that’s where new users went.

Because it sucked, and people fondly remembering it have blotted its manifold failures out of their memory. Imagine HN or Reddit, but virtually every post in every thread quotes huge chunks of preceding posts, often many layers deep. Randomly remove comments from threads; remove different comments from different servers at different times, to make sure nobody sees the exact same content. Eliminate search. Eliminate all but the most blunt-force moderation. Eliminate user profiles, or following particular users. Divide the universe into a global taxonomy of discussion topics, then allow people to cross-post from one to the other, starting firestorms of confused argument and complaint. Wait 2-12 hours for your discussion partners to see your as they move peristaltically through the store-and-forward NNTP system. Expire all history after a week or so. Every once in awhile, just for fun, drop a 50-comment-long chain of uuencoded binary chunks into the middle of your debate about Lisp.

Usenet was one of the first systems of its kind, and it's no wonder people look back on it wistfully. It was wild, being able to talk (or argue, or flame, or troll) people all around the world at every hour of the day. Usenet was amazing. So was the Sony Vaio. You wouldn't want to use it today, though.

I don't know what you're talking about. I use Usenet daily.

Usenet is the best forum system out there; everything web thing is just a ghetto/silo.

And yet you have 29622 karma points here. To accumulate those points, how many hours did you spend reading and writing on what you'd presumably call a ghetto/silo?

However, I've never been able to actually discuss anything substantial here beyond two or three exchanges at most, usually.

Where is the equivalent of the Usenet three-month-long thread?

The karma points are not transferable, which ticks off the checkbox under the silo column.

Isn't a mailing list as good at hosting a three-month-long thread as Usenet is?

Mailing lists are fine. I run a few, out of a box under my desk here. They do work for long discussions.

Usenet and e-mail are closely related; there is a reason for Usenet to exist.

There exist gateways between usenet and mailing lists, too.

If you join a new mailing list, your only option for "back issue" content is to go through an archive. Either a web archive, or else mbox files.

Usenet has a pull model. You connect your client to a server that stores articles going back whatever: months, years. You're not subscribed to receive anything spontaneously; if you want to quit Usenet, just exit the program, and that's it.

Numerous newsgroups are available in one place; you can search through them in your client and take a look. Mailing list archives tend to be scattered all over the place. GNU mailing lists here, BSD mailing lists there ...

On Usenet, you never have to use an identity with a real, working e-mail. Not so with mailing lists; they don't work without a reachable e-mail address.

Usenet has spam and so do mailing lists. But mailing lists have actual e-mail spam. Not only are lists sometimes the targets of spam, but spammers harvest addresses.

So, when I subscribe to mailing lists, I use throw-away addresses, unique for each list. This is a dance I do not have to do with Usenet.

When you use different addresses for subscribing to different mailing lists, you have to be careful to also use the matching addresses as your posting identity! (If you use your principal e-mail address by accident, it could get harvested. Or, something else: the posting might not go through to the list at all, due to that address not being a member.)

When a throw-away mailing list identity receives spam and you replace it with a new one, your old identity still exists in ongoing discussions and will be CC:'d in new postings.

You can use a working e-mail address in your Usenet From: header, if you choose to do so, so that you can be privately contacted. Getting a private e-mail reply from a Usenet posting is rare. If that address starts getting spam, it's pretty easy to change, just in your NNTP client setup. The address is not the basis of your NNTP identity, and so changing it doesn't break threads.

It doesn't involve your mailbox in any way. You don't have to register. "Subscribing" to a newsgroup is purely a local configuration, and you don't have to do that to post to it.

When you sum it all up, Usenet is easier to use and more casual than mailing lists. That gives it a different flavor.

I'm guessing you prefer terminal user interfaces to GUIs and spend a large fraction of your compute time in a terminal.

People mention the spam, but the decentralized nature also makes it plain harder to use than the web. It's like the difference between Mastodon and X.

Your experience was largely dependent on the server and client you happened to use. I mainly ended up reading threads on Deja News (later Google Groups) because you could at least search for messages that were outside of the retention period of most servers.