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Claiming you could focus on the conversation with Usenet is putting on some rose tinted glasses. By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and

Claiming you could focus on the conversation with Usenet is putting on some rose tinted glasses. By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply. Compared to even a simple WWWBoard the experience was often lacking in terms of focus.

jghn 3y ago
I mean, I used `tin` as my newsreader until somewhere between 2010-2015. It wasn't quite a hellscape of unusability if one was using a text only client.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  I should have clarified the GUI newsreaders. I'd be willing to bet a very small amount of money that around 2000 the majority of newsreaders in use by real humans (not spam bots) were Outlook Express and Netscape. There were some good GUI newsreaders but Outlook Express was a shit show. I remember OE was what my ISP had NNTP documentation for and nothing else.
  - jghn 3y ago
    Yeah, I think Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well
    - u801e 3y ago
      > Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well Thunderbird didn't come out until the early 2000s. The predecessors were Mozilla mail & news and Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey[1] is an offshoot of the former once Mozilla split mail and news into Firefox and Thunderbird. [1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
  - u801e 3y ago
    > Outlook Express was a shit show The main problem OE had was the quote wrapping problem that other clients didn't. The other was that it defaulted to top posting IIRC.
u801e 3y ago
> By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply. I didn't really start lurking and posting on usenet until the late '90s and while those problems occasionally cropped up, they really didn't interfere with the main discussion threads in the groups I was a regular in. I only stopped regularly using it by the early/mid 2010s because all the other regulars in the groups I was in ceased posting.

jghn 3y ago

I mean, I used `tin` as my newsreader until somewhere between 2010-2015. It wasn't quite a hellscape of unusability if one was using a text only client.

giantrobot 3y ago
I should have clarified the GUI newsreaders. I'd be willing to bet a very small amount of money that around 2000 the majority of newsreaders in use by real humans (not spam bots) were Outlook Express and Netscape. There were some good GUI newsreaders but Outlook Express was a shit show. I remember OE was what my ISP had NNTP documentation for and nothing else.
- jghn 3y ago
  Yeah, I think Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well
  - u801e 3y ago
    > Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well Thunderbird didn't come out until the early 2000s. The predecessors were Mozilla mail & news and Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey[1] is an offshoot of the former once Mozilla split mail and news into Firefox and Thunderbird. [1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
- u801e 3y ago
  > Outlook Express was a shit show The main problem OE had was the quote wrapping problem that other clients didn't. The other was that it defaulted to top posting IIRC.

u801e 3y ago

> By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply. I didn't really start lurking and posting on usenet until the late '90s and while those problems occasionally cropped up, they really didn't interfere with the main discussion threads in the groups I was a regular in. I only stopped regularly using it by the early/mid 2010s because all the other regulars in the groups I was in ceased posting.