Bring Back Crappy Forums
Key takeaways
- The number of newsgroups that many modern Usenet providers, including Giga News and Super News, promote as being available on their services.
- If you think about it, the web forum was a terrible fit for the way the Web worked.
- So I wondered, well, what did people think about the growth of web forums on Usenet?
The number of newsgroups that many modern Usenet providers, including Giga News and Super News, promote as being available on their services. The Usenet system, with roots in the late 1970s, was the first forum-like system many early internet users relied on, with the other primary option being email listservs. But by the late 1990s, the not-particularly-graphical Usenet was already falling out of favor.
If you think about it, the web forum was a terrible fit for the way the Web worked. We already technically had a tool that allowed people to communicate with one another in a forum setting in the early ’90s—Usenet.
Or, at least, that’s what it seemed like. So I wondered, well, what did people think about the growth of web forums on Usenet? And that led me in the direction of a fascinating post from modern-day futurist Eric Hunting.