> 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.
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.