It's called Usenet, and it still exists, though it's not as active as it used to be. Google Groups is decent for searching old Usenet posts (though they've rem

It's called Usenet, and it still exists, though it's not as active as it used to be. Google Groups is decent for searching old Usenet posts (though they've removed the "Advanced Search" feature), but horrible for posting. There are a number of NNTP clients (including Firefox) and free or cheap servers (I use news.eternal-september.org). (To be clear, Google Groups includes both an interface to Usenet newsgroups and Google's own non-Usenet groups. It's probably ok for the latter, but they seriously botched the Usenet interface.)