At my first programming job, the company had an internal NNTP server which we used for public (within the company) discussions. At that time, every decent mail

At my first programming job, the company had an internal NNTP server which we used for public (within the company) discussions. At that time, every decent mail client was also a newsreader, so people could easily flip back and forth between private correspondence and public discussion. News lets you write substantial, email-sized posts and replies, but it also plays perfectly well with quick one-liners. It allows threaded discussion, and newsreaders give you simple but effective tools to navigate it. It's fine if threads blow up and die out in a day, or if they live on for weeks. You can cross-post where a discussion touches different areas. You can post-and-mail if you want to attract a specific person's attention. It's easy to index (although i don't think we did that). It was amazing.