On the topic of usability, I wonder if perhaps it's a matter of familiarity. I missed the heyday of Usenet by several years and instead landed right in the mid

On the topic of usability, I wonder if perhaps it's a matter of familiarity. I missed the heyday of Usenet by several years and instead landed right in the middle of the phpBB/InvisionBB/vBulletin era, but also made heavy use of RSS/Atom and was curious about other protocols, and so at one point played around with Usenet by way of the Panic client Unison[0]. It might've just been the client (though that'd be surprising, given Panic's knack for UI design) but I didn't find it any more intuitive than web forums. The ability to search numerous groups at once was nice though. That's not to say that web forums were or are good however. They're a step above something like Discord at least because they're open, but forum search is notoriously bad and I've never come across forum software where navigation isn't somewhat clunky. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client)