I miss Usenet too, but let's not gloss over the fact that it was most definitely a technical constraint that prevented rich media; not being able to do anything

I miss Usenet too, but let's not gloss over the fact that it was most definitely a technical constraint that prevented rich media; not being able to do anything much more than ASCII text did lead to a lot of useful convention, and a disputative, textual culture, but if we could've put GIFs of IRIX machines booting (and, inevitably, crashing) faster than our VMS clusters could negotiate quorum, believe me, we would've.