On a different note, I think that while technology is part of the answer, there are other critical parts in the human element.
A particularly instructive example I would point to is https://board.spotlighthobbies.com/. It doesn't look like much, and the software is "some janky old Perl script that's incredibly fragile" (as the page footer now notes) that has some really horrible UI misfeatures, but that community has been there for 25 years and is one of the critical hubs of the hobby that it supports, so it is clearly doing a lot of things very well.
The big pieces that it gets right are obviously community. When Tom Carter started the board, he was a well-known figure in the hobby, and before launch he invited a dozen or two other respected people in the hobby to join and participate. That immediately gave the board credibility, so it attracted other people who had valuable things to contribute to the conversations, and it also meant that there were strong positive influences on the group culture from day one.
Also, at the time Tom was running full-page ads for his business in all the hobby magazines, so he put a blurb about the message board in those, which neatly addressed the "discoverability" problem in a way that simply couldn't be done online in that era (and likely not now either).
Tom actively moderated the board, quickly removing inflammatory or off-topic posts. (And, even though he has retired, the new board owners do similar moderation.) There isn't pre-post moderation, but after-post moderation happens pretty quickly, and I think there are IP filters for blocklisting problematic posters -- not ideal, but effective enough. That, manually-updated keyword filters, and exceptionally rudimentary password-based accounts for posting seem to keep the spam out. When an inflammatory or trolling post gets deleted, everything replying to it also gets deleted, and this plus reprimands means people generally don't engage the trolls.
I think it also matters that the board is attached to a retail company. It drives traffic to the business, which means that maintaining its health is a legitimate part of someone's day job. That's not a necessary condition for someone to be a high-touch moderator over multiple decades or for paying the bills to keep a centralized system running, as the Nielsen Haydens have demonstrated, but surely it helps.
There are a few pieces of the software that are notably useful, IMO. It uses a client-side cookie to record a "last read" time, so when you come back later it will tell you which messages are new so you can find them. The "index" view is compact, so you can scan conversations for interesting things easily -- and it has supported an emergent behavior of putting short replies in subject lines, so for a lot of conversations you don't even need to click through to the message. It supports linking to photos, which was really important for a visual-art medium. And it does an interesting sort of balance where the first page of the "index" view contains only recent posts, but within that set it threads things, so new messages in older threads don't get completely buried. This also provides a recency bias to things that people reply to, without restricting it.
Thinking about that, I think I have another item to add to my list of Usenet features:
* Although conversations are tree-threaded, topic drift is supported. Conversations have subject lines, and while the default is for the subject line to reflect the subject line of the previous message, you can also change it. Client UIs usually make this subject change visible in the index page so it's immediately visible when skimming, and some clients will even use it as a signal to consider the message to be the root of a new thread tree.
* Related to that, although thread trees are usually displayed as trees, they are usually presented to people with a bias towards the recent posts (perhaps only showing the unread messages, in a default view), rather than with an unchanging root. IMO, this promotes conversation expansion rather than contraction, which is valuable for promoting conversation in general.
no subject
A particularly instructive example I would point to is https://board.spotlighthobbies.com/. It doesn't look like much, and the software is "some janky old Perl script that's incredibly fragile" (as the page footer now notes) that has some really horrible UI misfeatures, but that community has been there for 25 years and is one of the critical hubs of the hobby that it supports, so it is clearly doing a lot of things very well.
The big pieces that it gets right are obviously community. When Tom Carter started the board, he was a well-known figure in the hobby, and before launch he invited a dozen or two other respected people in the hobby to join and participate. That immediately gave the board credibility, so it attracted other people who had valuable things to contribute to the conversations, and it also meant that there were strong positive influences on the group culture from day one.
Also, at the time Tom was running full-page ads for his business in all the hobby magazines, so he put a blurb about the message board in those, which neatly addressed the "discoverability" problem in a way that simply couldn't be done online in that era (and likely not now either).
Tom actively moderated the board, quickly removing inflammatory or off-topic posts. (And, even though he has retired, the new board owners do similar moderation.) There isn't pre-post moderation, but after-post moderation happens pretty quickly, and I think there are IP filters for blocklisting problematic posters -- not ideal, but effective enough. That, manually-updated keyword filters, and exceptionally rudimentary password-based accounts for posting seem to keep the spam out. When an inflammatory or trolling post gets deleted, everything replying to it also gets deleted, and this plus reprimands means people generally don't engage the trolls.
I think it also matters that the board is attached to a retail company. It drives traffic to the business, which means that maintaining its health is a legitimate part of someone's day job. That's not a necessary condition for someone to be a high-touch moderator over multiple decades or for paying the bills to keep a centralized system running, as the Nielsen Haydens have demonstrated, but surely it helps.
There are a few pieces of the software that are notably useful, IMO. It uses a client-side cookie to record a "last read" time, so when you come back later it will tell you which messages are new so you can find them. The "index" view is compact, so you can scan conversations for interesting things easily -- and it has supported an emergent behavior of putting short replies in subject lines, so for a lot of conversations you don't even need to click through to the message. It supports linking to photos, which was really important for a visual-art medium. And it does an interesting sort of balance where the first page of the "index" view contains only recent posts, but within that set it threads things, so new messages in older threads don't get completely buried. This also provides a recency bias to things that people reply to, without restricting it.
Thinking about that, I think I have another item to add to my list of Usenet features:
* Although conversations are tree-threaded, topic drift is supported. Conversations have subject lines, and while the default is for the subject line to reflect the subject line of the previous message, you can also change it. Client UIs usually make this subject change visible in the index page so it's immediately visible when skimming, and some clients will even use it as a signal to consider the message to be the root of a new thread tree.
* Related to that, although thread trees are usually displayed as trees, they are usually presented to people with a bias towards the recent posts (perhaps only showing the unread messages, in a default view), rather than with an unchanging root. IMO, this promotes conversation expansion rather than contraction, which is valuable for promoting conversation in general.