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I never cease to be amazed and dismayed at how much worse contemporary web based discussion technologies (HN, Slashdot, Reddit, Disqus) are than Usenet was back

• jacquesm 9y ago
  Even on the web there are/were much better fora from a UI perspective than the four you mention, for instance 'scoop'. But those have not been maintained and would likely die instantly on the hostile place that is the web today. But functionality wise they were pretty good.
• klodolph 9y ago
  That’s fascinating… because I remember Usenet as being a complete cesspool, useful if you wanted to get into arguments with the loudest people out there. Not sure what “back in the day” is for you, but I remember e.g. comp.lang.lisp being terrible in the 90s. And we all made jokes about flamewars, because flamewars were reality.
  • u801e 9y ago
    A lot of those problems could be solved by using a kill filter for posts from certain individuals and ones that were crossposted to certain groups. You could also just selectively kill threads (or subthreads) for discussions that weren't of interest to you.
  • microtherion 9y ago
    Yes, there were lots of arguments and loud people (referring to the 1990s), but thanks to open protocols, there were newsreaders suitable for every kind of usage profile, and many of them had very effective killfiles. Even the dumbest of them would remember what articles you read and let you pick up where you left when you came back the next day. That's a straightforward feature that is sorely lacking on most web based discussion sites (Twitter does it, but is lacking in threading).