Usenet is a very old technology. Just about everyone has a USENET account (and many don’t) and it is on almost every modern computer. And it has been around for almost as long as email itself, but its role has changed dramatically over the decades.
In the 70s and 80s, it was primarily a discussion platform: lots of people hanging out in one place when they were bored or they were just trying to talk with their friends. The Usenet group was pretty homogenous — basically everyone had the same settings and preferences. But then someone realized that newsgroups could be used to organize groups of people having similar interests (i.e., similar points of view), so Usenet became a sort of moderated discussion forum for people who didn’t have any friends:
So Usenet went from being a social network for nerds to being something more like Facebook now than it ever was before Facebook came along:
People often get me wrong, but I have never heard anyone say “I can only use usenet with my friends” (which is why I love how we are now able to do that with Slack/Telegram). Also, in the 90s and early 2000s, we had this much-loved system called “university network” which allowed people to set up message boards for their classwork; this was particularly popular during college years when students could be more easily distracted:
During the dotcom era, things changed again: now we are doing everything online! It didn’t take long for us to realize that we needed more tools - tools like mailing lists and forums - because without them we couldn't provide any value at all as an internet company:
Our team is made up of people who have been through all three phases described above; let’s shed some light on what each phase means for your business!
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