So why do you think Usenet is not the mainstream status quo for conversations then?
Usenet was one of the first systems of its kind, and it's no wonder people look back on it wistfully. It was wild, being able to talk (or argue, or flame, or troll) people all around the world at every hour of the day. Usenet was amazing. So was the Sony Vaio. You wouldn't want to use it today, though.
Usenet is the best forum system out there; everything web thing is just a ghetto/silo.
Where is the equivalent of the Usenet three-month-long thread?
The karma points are not transferable, which ticks off the checkbox under the silo column.
Usenet and e-mail are closely related; there is a reason for Usenet to exist.
There exist gateways between usenet and mailing lists, too.
If you join a new mailing list, your only option for "back issue" content is to go through an archive. Either a web archive, or else mbox files.
Usenet has a pull model. You connect your client to a server that stores articles going back whatever: months, years. You're not subscribed to receive anything spontaneously; if you want to quit Usenet, just exit the program, and that's it.
Numerous newsgroups are available in one place; you can search through them in your client and take a look. Mailing list archives tend to be scattered all over the place. GNU mailing lists here, BSD mailing lists there ...
On Usenet, you never have to use an identity with a real, working e-mail. Not so with mailing lists; they don't work without a reachable e-mail address.
Usenet has spam and so do mailing lists. But mailing lists have actual e-mail spam. Not only are lists sometimes the targets of spam, but spammers harvest addresses.
So, when I subscribe to mailing lists, I use throw-away addresses, unique for each list. This is a dance I do not have to do with Usenet.
When you use different addresses for subscribing to different mailing lists, you have to be careful to also use the matching addresses as your posting identity! (If you use your principal e-mail address by accident, it could get harvested. Or, something else: the posting might not go through to the list at all, due to that address not being a member.)
When a throw-away mailing list identity receives spam and you replace it with a new one, your old identity still exists in ongoing discussions and will be CC:'d in new postings.
You can use a working e-mail address in your Usenet From: header, if you choose to do so, so that you can be privately contacted. Getting a private e-mail reply from a Usenet posting is rare. If that address starts getting spam, it's pretty easy to change, just in your NNTP client setup. The address is not the basis of your NNTP identity, and so changing it doesn't break threads.
It doesn't involve your mailbox in any way. You don't have to register. "Subscribing" to a newsgroup is purely a local configuration, and you don't have to do that to post to it.
When you sum it all up, Usenet is easier to use and more casual than mailing lists. That gives it a different flavor.
In fact, many organizations had (and some still may have) inhouse groups, often prefixed "local." e.g. "local.events", "local.jokes" etc.
Advantage: threaded discussions, open standard (many existing open source readers e.g. Emacs: M-x gnus)
Doesn't that make Usenet unfit for complex public discussions, at least?
I haven’t seen the lack of voting to be a major problem in newsgroups or traditional web forums. But I’ve come to despise the prevalent dynamics of liking/voting in newer platforms.
But if the truth-seeking you're thinking of is being a culture war truther, that'd certainly explain the woes.
It can be difficult to discuss inside an enterprise because everyone’s already so committed to a particular solution.
People have very strong opinions about crypto, SPAs, and CDNs.
The words they used are social liability, not merely controversial. It's a pretty high bar for how wrong a discussion in an enterprise has to go that it turns into a social liability.
Anyway, you don't have to go all the way there for knowledge to become a social liability. The more you understand about the universe and the human world - hell, the more permission to think you give yourself - the more you realize just how much utter bullshit regular people believe about everything. Homeopathy, weird coaching stuff, fitness and dieting and cosmetics. This supplement will help your health, that fruit will stop some ailment, looking at a microwave when it's cooking will ruin your eyes, etc. Most of this bullshit is fed by content marketers, through magazines, shows, radio, podcasts, and social media.
I have a whole rant about ethics of advertising, but that's for another day; point here is: it doesn't take much truth-seeking before it gets incredibly cringe to talk with most people. You either let them keep believing in bullshit and suffer inside, or speak up and end up being pushed out of the group.
Your experience was largely dependent on the server and client you happened to use. I mainly ended up reading threads on Deja News (later Google Groups) because you could at least search for messages that were outside of the retention period of most servers.
> More generally, while a few people are willing to pay for access to a discussion service, most aren't
Agreed.