What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
Usenet is a system so bad that "posting a message on a Usenet server and having it appear on other servers in a few seconds" sounds like an achievement. And: both those other systems have reliable ways to see all the new messages on a thread, unlike Usenet, which couldn't even guarantee that you'd see all the messages, let alone in order.
I was a Usenet systems engineer (regional ISP operator, INN hacker) during the heyday of Usenet, and a dedicated user in that time as well. These rose-tinted views of how well Usenet worked don't fly for me at all. Reddit is actively, materially, multifariously better than Usenet, and Reddit is not the state of the art.
Comments
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
Usenet is a system so bad that "posting a message on a Usenet server and having it appear on other servers in a few seconds" sounds like an achievement. And: both those other systems have reliable ways to see all the new messages on a thread, unlike Usenet, which couldn't even guarantee that you'd see all the messages, let alone in order.
I was a Usenet systems engineer (regional ISP operator, INN hacker) during the heyday of Usenet, and a dedicated user in that time as well. These rose-tinted views of how well Usenet worked don't fly for me at all. Reddit is actively, materially, multifariously better than Usenet, and Reddit is not the state of the art.
To be fair, that's probably because it's now a lot more centralized than it was intended to be.