I've used both at length, and still use Usenet to this day. Besides reddit being centralized, how are they dissimilar? Is it really that bad if an analogy for a readership that likely have no clue what Usenet is?
Reddit: community moderators can delete spam from the group and stop flame-wars in their tracks; a lot of the noise posts don't show up for most people because most people are looking at "hot" instead of "new";
Usenet: it's on you to create filters and mute threads that you don't want to see. Everyone is their own moderator. (Pretty much exactly in the way that you're the moderator of your own email inbox, smart recipient-side filtering and DNSRBLs notwithstanding.)
It seems like a small difference, but I feel like it's actually responsible for large social differences in the resulting communities.
In a Usenet group (or, equivalently, an unmoderated email list), the spam and flames are visible to everyone, and everyone is forced to engage in at least a bit of the work of moderation—even if it's just to copy and paste a blacklist from an FAQ message into their NNTP client's config. This, IMHO, makes people less likely to overreact to negative/offtopic/trolling/spam posts—they're inured to them, in about the same sense that an immune system that frequently interacts with real threats is less likely to get an auto-immune disease; or about the same way that people who live in the projects are less likely than people in gated communities to call the police just because someone they don't know is walking down the street.
I agree. Many of the mechanics that grew up around dealing with NNTP made for a very different experience compared to web forums. And I think we've lost something as we've moved on from it. (It was also a right pain in the ass in several ways... I just prefer the balance that made us strike to the dynamic that grows in a web forum now.)
I was cringing because I think the comparison between reddit and late usenet is accurate, and I don't like that. Usenet was different at one point, that went away, and the cringe is because newsgroups looked a lot like subreddits by the end. You couldn't have had early 90s NANAE on reddit, and I don't think there is any public forum that is in the ballpark now.
I should probably add that I'm saying this as a fan of and avid user of reddit. I'm unhappy about what we lost as Usenet wound down, not complaining about reddit.
Before the eternal September, the structure and form of usenet encouraged discussions that were just qualitatively different than what I enjoy on reddit these days.
My cringe wasn't due to a bad analogy. I was cringing because I remember what usenet was like once, and the last time I spent much time there, it had lost so much of what made it good that, yes, comparing newsgroups to subreddits is essentially on point, now.
I cringed because the analogy is on target and I don't like that as much as I liked usenet before. Comparing it to reddit gives a pretty good picture of late stage usenet for people who didn't experience it. At one time (I think including the time period this article is covering) there was more to it than that, though.
Of the platforms that are still used enough that casual users know about them, Reddit is probably the closest to Usenet, so it gives a broad idea for those unfamiliar - enough to understand the context.
I don't disagree with that. Especially when it comes to late usenet. I was cringing because usenet started better and wound up at a point where reddit is a good comparison, not claiming it was a bad analogy.
Old tyme internet user here who doesn't get the slightest bit of cringe out of these statements. Reddit is the closest analogy to usenet which relates to later adopters. And perhaps the WWW technically existed in 1993, it was really 1994 when it burst onto the scene.
(Internet was originally non-commercial but there were terminal services where you could email or usenet. Outside of universities and tech corps, ISPs where you could get a personal IP connection weren't much of a thing prior to 1994. There was also pretty much zero discussion on the web in the twentieth century.)
Maybe it's a case of only remembering the good, but I feel like usenet in the '80s and early '90s fostered discourse that was very different than what I see on reddit today. I agree that it's a fair comparison against what usenet eventually became... I was cringing because it is fair and usenet was once better.
I'd agree with that in at least part. Reddit is bad at fostering discussion, one of my major complaints against it.
But its overall role is similar to Usenet: A space for topical discussion on a wide range of topics.
Usenet in the late 1980s was small. 880,000 people with access, about 140,000 actually using (posting) to it, and a core group of probably only a few thousands. John Quarteman's book The Matrix includes Brian Reid's stats from DEC at the time. It grew some by the early 1990s, but the Eternal September still hit with force.
Reddit's user stats are roughly 2,400x that, with 330 million MAU. Scale matters. As does design UI/UX, and a good newsreader >>> Reddit's Web interface.
"It was called Usenet, which was kind of like Reddit today"