* It was discoverable. Part of this was that although it was large, the group-space was functionally finite. Part of this was that there was some amount of hierarchy. Part of this was being able to follow interesting people to other groups (although I have no memory of how I did that). The result was that I was able to find several great communities about topics that I was interested in, and they were "the" community for that interest.
* The information-transmission system and the UI client were entirely separate. That led to a proliferation of UI clients that met different people's needs. You already mentioned that, but I think one of the critical pieces is that it allowed a lot of programmers to experiment with what made the system work for them, which made for far more innovation than would have happened with a centralized owner of "the UI".
* Local groups were supported using the same system as global groups.
* Although conversations were threaded, there was no assumption that the reader was able to immediately reference the previous message in the thread, and this evolutionary pressure led to a bottom-posting writing style where one explicitly quoted the text that one was replying to before writing the reply.
* More-generally, the time delay in posts was an evolutionary pressure that led to longer-form writing rather than single-sentence replies. This was also supported by the fact that it was possible to reply at any point in the thread -- there was minimal evolutionary pressure to respond quickly before the conversation moved on.
* Notification-wise, replies to threads were equal to "top-level" posts that created new threads. This avoids the problem that Dreamwidth often has, where if a conversation shows up under a week-old post, nobody who's not in the conversation will see it. More generally, although conversations were tree-threaded, the typical reading style was to just read the new posts from the last day, and Usenet readers made this reading style very easy to do. (This feels very rare among threaded forums.)
* Several of the newsgroups I was in died not because of the Inevitable Death of Usenet, but because of specific people who dominated conversations with their personal ideology. They weren't "toxic" in the obvious sense; they were simply deeply committed to an ideology that was at odds with other posters and also capable of writing large volumes of posts, and the result was that conversations in the group became more and more dominated by debating their ideology. All of this was nominally on-topic, and the "death" of the group wasn't visible in a decline in posts, but thoughtful discussion of any other topic got derailed enough that people stopped writing it.
* Groups typically had clear and relatively-easily-findable charters of what was considered on-topic and off-topic. Also, the lack of easy access to back archives meant that well-curated FAQs were common.
no subject
* It was discoverable. Part of this was that although it was large, the group-space was functionally finite. Part of this was that there was some amount of hierarchy. Part of this was being able to follow interesting people to other groups (although I have no memory of how I did that). The result was that I was able to find several great communities about topics that I was interested in, and they were "the" community for that interest.
* The information-transmission system and the UI client were entirely separate. That led to a proliferation of UI clients that met different people's needs. You already mentioned that, but I think one of the critical pieces is that it allowed a lot of programmers to experiment with what made the system work for them, which made for far more innovation than would have happened with a centralized owner of "the UI".
* Local groups were supported using the same system as global groups.
* Although conversations were threaded, there was no assumption that the reader was able to immediately reference the previous message in the thread, and this evolutionary pressure led to a bottom-posting writing style where one explicitly quoted the text that one was replying to before writing the reply.
* More-generally, the time delay in posts was an evolutionary pressure that led to longer-form writing rather than single-sentence replies. This was also supported by the fact that it was possible to reply at any point in the thread -- there was minimal evolutionary pressure to respond quickly before the conversation moved on.
* Notification-wise, replies to threads were equal to "top-level" posts that created new threads. This avoids the problem that Dreamwidth often has, where if a conversation shows up under a week-old post, nobody who's not in the conversation will see it. More generally, although conversations were tree-threaded, the typical reading style was to just read the new posts from the last day, and Usenet readers made this reading style very easy to do. (This feels very rare among threaded forums.)
* Several of the newsgroups I was in died not because of the Inevitable Death of Usenet, but because of specific people who dominated conversations with their personal ideology. They weren't "toxic" in the obvious sense; they were simply deeply committed to an ideology that was at odds with other posters and also capable of writing large volumes of posts, and the result was that conversations in the group became more and more dominated by debating their ideology. All of this was nominally on-topic, and the "death" of the group wasn't visible in a decline in posts, but thoughtful discussion of any other topic got derailed enough that people stopped writing it.
* Groups typically had clear and relatively-easily-findable charters of what was considered on-topic and off-topic. Also, the lack of easy access to back archives meant that well-curated FAQs were common.