Exactly. It's an artifact from a time when the grand vision of the Web was to be much more participatory and collaborative, much like how we think of wiki sites

Exactly. It's an artifact from a time when the grand vision of the Web was to be much more participatory and collaborative, much like how we think of wiki sites today. In those days the goal was emphatically not to create yet another channel for the unidirectional flow of content from producers to consumers.