"I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups... but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise..." Me, too. My presence there began in 1987. Part of what helpe

"I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups... but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise..." Me, too. My presence there began in 1987. Part of what helped its signal-to-noise ratio was that participants tended to be in industry or academia, resulting in both better-informed contributors and a sense of community. There was, of course, the odd flamewar here and troll there, but they were the exception, not the rule. Even passionate arguments were mostly civil (ah, comp.lang.c was quite a lively place as the ANSI standard was being discussed... even just the NOALIAS debate alone). Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming text unrelated to the context you were discussing (interleaved posting, as Wiki calls it). As the AOL bridge and the top-posting mongrel horde of Outlook posters flooded in, there went the neighborhood... damn neighbor kids messing up our lawn!