A mere twenty years after it was last relevant, I had a look at Usenet.
And as it turns out, it sucks.
Text Usenet (no binaries) is one of the many excellent services provided by the Cambridge University Student Run Computing Facility (SRCF) and I thought I'd give it a go.
My initial impression was one of a ghost town. Lots and lots of empty groups and so much spam. I don't know why this was a surprise given that unmoderated really does mean unmoderated.
One question I had was "who the hell still uses Usenet", other than those who brandish cutlasses with a yo-ho-ho. The answer seems to be old farts, old trolls, and spammers. I was astonished that people so long in the tooth still felt the need to be so hot-headed and irritable. Clearly nobody could have predicted that a system where anyone could go and talk about their interests with anyone else in the world would end up a more uncivil, spam-ridden cesspool than comments on public Facebook posts.
It seems to have been this way for twenty-five years, too: cited on Wikipedia, Bruce Schneier noted in 1995 of alt.sci.crypt:
It is read by an estimated 100,000 people worldwide. Most of the posts are nonsense, bickering, or both; some are political, and most of the rest are requests for information or basic questions. Occasionally nuggets of new and useful information are posted to this newsgroup.
Aside from the sky-high user numbers, this still applied to most of the groups I looked at. Overall, the impression I have is of social media before social media, and arguably worse in the absence of the Algorithm to cut through the crap (never thought I'd say that!). I have seen better discussions unfold on 4chan than some of the rubbish here. I think it speaks volumes that the group with by far the most activity was alt.politics.trump. I'm not entirely sure why this was, but it's probably some combination of
The experience helped me to understand some social media design features (like buttons, upvoting) as well as the importance of robust spam filtering. But if I ever go back, I think I'll probably stick to ucam.societies.srcf...