I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups -- NNTP ones, not yahoo or google groups, or any of the pale http immitations. The best were usually moderated of course, but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise. I imagine how they might be now with rich text rendering, e.g. embedded TeX and images.
Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast console programs like tin) really helped. There were no 'likes' or 'vote' buttons. But there was the ability to whitelist or blacklist certain authors by adding them to a user's 'killfile', leading to the wonderfully pithy permanent downvote reply:
"I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups... but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise..."
Me, too. My presence there began in 1987.
Part of what helped its signal-to-noise ratio was that participants tended to be in industry or academia, resulting in both better-informed contributors and a sense of community.
There was, of course, the odd flamewar here and troll there, but they were the exception, not the rule. Even passionate arguments were mostly civil (ah, comp.lang.c was quite a lively place as the ANSI standard was being discussed... even just the NOALIAS debate alone).
Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming text unrelated to the context you were discussing (interleaved posting, as Wiki calls it).
As the AOL bridge and the top-posting mongrel horde of Outlook posters flooded in, there went the neighborhood... damn neighbor kids messing up our lawn!
Preach it ;-) Even the raging assholes had a more interesting command of invective, the food tasted better and the air was fresher ... well ... one out of three ain't bad ...
I never really got into usenet (proper news clients) - but I still read (and occasionally participate) on email lists.
Just in case there are some readers here with an interest in news, but unaware - the d-lang forum software is open source, and built around usenet technology:
Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast console programs like tin) really helped. There were no 'likes' or 'vote' buttons. But there was the ability to whitelist or blacklist certain authors by adding them to a user's 'killfile', leading to the wonderfully pithy permanent downvote reply:
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