Does anyone remember websites?

That is the natural order of things, even for the internet. That said, I miss them too ;)

It's interesting you didn't list any disadvantages of Usenet. NNTP protocol doesn't have identity authentication. Therefore, you get spam and forged headers. This isn't any fault of NNTP; it was built for a different era. From a content standpoint and not a technical one, USENET was at its peak, before 1990s, when it was primarily universities and governments. The smallness of the tech community and the inherent collegial atmosphere didn't exploit the vulnerabilities in NNTP. I'll agree with others that it all rapidly declined after AOL opened it up to the masses. To regain the "reading pleasure" I got from USENET in the 1980s, I have to use Reddit/HN/Stackoverflow.

You listed the following technical advantages:

>- Store, read, search content offline

>- Access information redundantly (no SPOF)

>- Integrate viewing and composing with local tools

I'll group those 3 bullet points together since they are related to each other. I agree that those technical advantages are true for USENET. Your comment spurred me to revisit my USENET usage history and attempt to articulate why it's no longer relevant to how I use the web.

I participated in USENET from ~1988 to 2006 -- so about 18 years worth activity. The last years of downloading and reading messages was a tedious chore. With Usenet messages having no voting system, I had to slog through a sea of bad replies to get to the good comments. It was a horrible waste of limited reading time.

Once I got hooked into Reddit in 2006, reading crowdsourced comments became more of a pleasure again. Yes, I 100% agree that voting leads to "groupthink" and "hivemind". But even with those problems, catching up on 500 unread messages ranked by votes instead of 500 messages in pure chronological order is easier. I already suffered through unvoted messages for 18 years. I don't want to go back to that. Experiencing Reddit made me realize that the "terrible voting system" is the unofficial way we combat the "Eternal September"[1]. (Also, the Google search engine was better than anything else because it weighed the "unoffical votes" of links in the PageRank algorithm.)

Forum voting is like that saying about Capitalism -- "it's the worst forum system, except for all the others".

Usenet was like doing homework. Reddit is like a quick dopamine rush.

It's good that both Reddit and Usenet can coexist. A subreddit like "reddit.com/r/cpp/"[2] can coexist with USENET "comp.lang.c++"[3]. Although I have almost 2 decades of training to compose offline messages for "comp.lang.c++", I have no urge to do so. The technical advantages for Usenet you listed doesn't offset its flaws in content. These days, I just go to the C++ subreddit to get my daily fix on what's new because the content is better presented for limited reading time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/

[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.c++

this was the experience at my college, anyway

Product Selection Engines (PSE's) were a different value proposition than product or brand promotion. They are fun to write for engineers because they correct purchase errors with IT good deeds like Consumer Reports but with user variables on priorities or constraints.

The Consumer Web threw out a great deal of baby with the .com era bathwater.

Can we start sharing these somewhere? I have several I'd like to contribute.