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0 pointsfps_doug2y ago0 comments

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

This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "misbehaved" even in the slightest; you'd have the "n00bs" post and then a dozen replies by the regulars circle-jerking by dissecting the OP down to every little detail they did wrong and trying to one-up each other in sarcasm. A typical flex was the length of your killfile.

Web-Based bulletin-boards (phpBB, vBulletin, WBB, ...) quickly took over in the early 2000s, which had the advantage of having superior moderation tools (e.g. being able to remove spam after the fact), giving a more consistent experience to users. Bulletin boards still tended to have the elitist group of regulars compared to usenet, albeit less pronounced. Some/Much of this can probably also be attributed to the users of those boards being a new generation of Internet users, which just had a different approach and attitude, much like we see today with facebook vs. Instagram, YouTube vs. TikTok etc.

What managed to mostly kill Internet forums was probably reddit, which improved SNR a lot by having the up/downvote system, and while technically being even more centralized than bulletin boards, managed to grow so much by basically allowing their users to create subreddits, which would equal the sub-forums in bulletin boards, which only the board's administrator could create.

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dredmorbius2y ago

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.