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> Don't Reddit and Twitter email you when you get a reply -- or at least have the option to get an email?

Yes, but you would have to check a completely different service to see whether you got any replies. Most people would probably refresh the comments page or click on the notification icon directly in the page.

> With Usenet you had to go check.

Clients could be configured to check for message every X minutes/hours, etc, but just clicking on "Get messages" would show unread messages. And you could easily find replies to your comment(s) since the thread pane would essentially provide an indexed view of the entire thread including every subthread that you could expand/collapse. The other advantage was that you could see new messages in context.

On the other hand, when clicking the notification icon in reddit, you see new messages in isolation and would have to click on the context link to see what they're referring to.

> Are there other use cases now for Usenet nowadays?

Maybe not usenet itself, but NNTP gateways can be used to browse mailing lists.

From what I've read, they're transferring multiple petabytes of data a day between different backbone NNTP server farms.

> Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did.

Until Outlook Express was replaced by Windows Mail, most users computers did come with a NNTP client.

> Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups.

It actually happened the other way around. Local ISPs had newsgroups that had limited distribution where people local to you would post about upcoming events, things they were looking to rent or buy, things they wanted to sell, etc.

> The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers

There's nothing really stopping a local ISP from running a server that's not connected to an upstream feed and requiring credentials to post. That would be localized and a lot more relevant to those in the community if they really wanted a local discussion forum.

> I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog

> There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet.

You could the list of newsgroups for phrases that could lead you to an interesting group. Other times, someone in the group may mention the other group if you mention your interest in a comment. At least, that's how I found a lot of different newsgroups when I was regularly reading and posting to usenet.

> One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET.

Google at one point did a very good job at indexing usenet posts and including them in their search results. If I searched for the name I used when posting to usenet, I would get hundreds of results of posts I made. But if I try searching now, very few results from usenet come up (perhaps because of the age of the posts).

> Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :)

I'm actually surprised he didn't mention that in his article.

> If Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece.

I never really looked into it, but if someone were to make a NNTP bridge for reddit, Hacker News, and other similar websites, would it be against their respective TOSs?

> Usenet was at one point a huge portion of internet traffic.

Usenet posts were just text that may have been several kilobytes in size at most. If you look at binary newsgroups, the current level of internet traffic is quite large[1] (though that was 12 years ago and is by now multiple petabytes per day).

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/26/usenet-traffic-growth-to-a...

> How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.

The from column in the thread pane view in my client[1] makes it easy to see the difference between participants, and also gives an indexed view of the entire thread. You don't get that with Hacker News or Reddit.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/i226q2c.png

> Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well

Thunderbird didn't come out until the early 2000s. The predecessors were Mozilla mail & news and Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey[1] is an offshoot of the former once Mozilla split mail and news into Firefox and Thunderbird.

[1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

> Outlook Express was a shit show

The main problem OE had was the quote wrapping problem that other clients didn't. The other was that it defaulted to top posting IIRC.

> By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply.

I didn't really start lurking and posting on usenet until the late '90s and while those problems occasionally cropped up, they really didn't interfere with the main discussion threads in the groups I was a regular in. I only stopped regularly using it by the early/mid 2010s because all the other regulars in the groups I was in ceased posting.

> There was also Outlook Express.

It was the one client that never fixed their quoted text wrapping bug IIRC.

> But as a commercial matter, you could not; if you didn't have binary groups, you weren't offering real Usenet (and if your binary feeds weren't ultra-reliable, you were offering shitty Usenet).

None of the ISPs I had from the mid '90s through 2010 ever had reliable binary news feeds. Most would be missing too many articles, or articles would expire within hours and the download could never be reassembled.

Anyone who really wanted binaries started using paid services and just use their ISPs usenet feed for text discussion.

And the yEncoding scheme also got rid of the 33% data size overhead inherent in base64 encoding. It's too bad that never made it over to email.

> Seems like nobody has mentioned a huge reason Usenet failed:

> It needed a client program.

Many services required client programs to use. Email did and still does unless you use webmail. And there are services that allow you to read and post to usenet through one's browser.

> Yes it is slow

People using it for binary downloads can pull down data at gigabit speeds.

> it should still be kept as a no-frills alternative when things have to depend on low-bandwidth.

It's unfortunate that most websites and other services require significant amounts of bandwidth. If I'm using a GPRS connection on my phone, websites other than Hacker News are not really usable. IRC and Usenet still work though.

> Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why

It was because the attorney general of New York (Andrew Cuomo) made a deal with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography[1]. ISPs decided to drop their usenet service in response.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...

> There's no reason a private/paid service addon to a client can't work for filtering.

There should be no reason why a service can't provide that feature natively.

> Client-side filtering requires awareness of client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ?

Facebook[1] and Reddit[2] both have a block user feature. It's a very rudimentary version of the killfile that usenet clients have. If users didn't want features like that, then they wouldn't be available on either platform.

> client-side filtering fails against organized harassment.

Usenet killfiles were advanced enough that you could easily filter out messages even from organized campaigns. For example, filtering it based on a number of conditions such as group header, from header, a unique header, certain keywords in the body, etc.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/168009843260943

[2] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/214548323-H...

> the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.)

I thought this was due to the deal[1] that Andrew Cuomo (New York's attorney general at the time) made with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography. Many major ISPs discontinued their usenet service in that time period.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...

> lack of notification method

The way usenet clients worked was when new message headers were downloaded, the client would highlight unread messages. It's pretty similar to email where when you receive new messages, you can tell that they haven't been read before you read them. Websites like Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, etc lack this feature.

Facebook, for instance, does have a notification system, but makes it very difficult to find the specific reply to your post or comment because it frequently filters out comments from being displayed unless "all comments" is selected from the drop down. Once that selection is made, you have to expand every thread to find the reply to your comment.

> Usenet is a tried-to-be globally governed forum service

Globally governed by whom? The only real governance was the creation of new groups in the Big 8 hierarchy. And, unless the group was moderated, anyone could post or reply to a comment.

> Some server don't allow large attachments, some don't allow HTML message

Text groups had conventions disallowing HTML or attachments, so very few people used them (unless their client wasn't configured properly).

> The protocol don't really help it too. NNTP for example, is neither a high efficient nor resilient protocol. If your mail got too large, or your link is unstable, you'll have some nightmares trying to send it out.

Message size isn't an issue for plain text messages and all major usenet services have no issues handling articles up to 750 Kb in size (for binary groups).

> NNTP is also not a well-designed protocol

What specifically is not well designed?

> NNTP clients (Thunderbird and Outlook)

Outlook never supported NNTP

> will just let the user handle every error encountered

What errors are you specifically referring to?

> So for me, Usenet is just simply outdated. That's all there is to it.

Based on what you've posted, it doesn't seem like you have much if any first hand experience using a NNTP client or have read any of the related RFC documents documenting the NNTP application level protocol.

> anonymity (email address not exposed)

Quite a few people posted under pseudonyms with fake email addresses on usenet.

> notifications

When you downloaded new headers from the server, the client would highlight the new messages in a way that made it very easy to see which messages you haven't seen and whether you got any replies to your message. Try doing that in Hacker News, reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

In my opinion, the main reason[1][2] for its decline in terms of text discussions was due to the deal that Andrew Cuomo (the attorney general of New York at the time) made with the major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography. This resulted in many ISPs discontinuing their usenet offering and cutting off their customers from it.

Unless those customers made an effort to access usenet some other way, they stopped using it.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cuomo-strong-arms-co...

> I do know what I saw with my own eyes

What did you see with your own eyes. Were you a first hand witness of a ballot box stuffing incident? When and where did it happen? Did you take a video of it with sound?

> video shows people stuffing ballots in boxes all across the country

How do you know when those videos were made? Who recorded those videos? Where was each video taken (which voting district and when)?

> where ballot counting was shut down in four states simultaneously and then restarted

Which four states? What what was the date and time the ballot counting stopped? What was the date and time the ballot counting resumed?

> And there's other weird stuff that I honestly should have been keeping track of.

Like what? Any concrete examples?

> I don't think the election was fair, I think it was rigged.

Yet you're very non-specific about your reasoning and evidence. Typically, people cite sources that support their argument, but you did not.

Buses do have radios where one can contact dispatch and other drivers.

Maybe employees should take that into account. If work hours are from 9 am through 5 pm, then the commute starts at 9 am and again at 4 pm.

I think people prefer mailing lists over nntp due to a number of reasons:

1. It's easier to set a mailing list up compared to creating a new newsgroup or setting up an on-premise NNTP server (is NNTP as a service even a thing?)

2. Most people have access to email clients (either web based or local applications) compared to NNTP clients.

Personally, I think it would be much better if people use NNTP instead of mailing lists, but doing so would require somoene to maintain the NNTP server and handle account creation for posting access.

The only think that email lacks that nntp has is the ability to easily find messages from before you subscribed to the list (or were CC'd). With email, you could download a list archive and import it in your MUA, but with NNTP, you can just subscribe to a group and pull up messages as far back as you want (up till the oldest message on the server).