Hmm, my thoughts on some down sides of newsgroups.
The lack of someone in control of each newsgroup made many types of change trickier. A newsgroup couldn’t add voting buttons as easily as a web forum, for example, they’d need to change a whole lot of newsreader software to do it. Or if you wanted to display a captcha before letting people post. Some types of innovation were easier, because you could add features to a newsreader without needing support from an owner of each newsgroup, but some needed support from the software of both the poster and reader of a message, or for both a poster and moderator.
Links and bookmarks are better on the web—the old browsers with newsgroup support probably handled these well, but you couldn’t depend on everyone’s software handling them. If you could just follow an nntp link to a post on another newsgroup on another server, that could have allowed the same balance of powers blogs do—the blogger has total control of moderation on their own site, but the expectation is that people don’t just stay on one site and all the links make it easy to move between them.
As it was it felt like you had to stay in the same newsgroup if you wanted people to read your stuff. I think this meant you couldn’t have much moderation without feeling stifled, and also that newsgroups would grow large without being able to split easily.
Hmm, my thoughts on some down sides of newsgroups.
The lack of someone in control of each newsgroup made many types of change trickier. A newsgroup couldn’t add voting buttons as easily as a web forum, for example, they’d need to change a whole lot of newsreader software to do it. Or if you wanted to display a captcha before letting people post. Some types of innovation were easier, because you could add features to a newsreader without needing support from an owner of each newsgroup, but some needed support from the software of both the poster and reader of a message, or for both a poster and moderator.
Links and bookmarks are better on the web—the old browsers with newsgroup support probably handled these well, but you couldn’t depend on everyone’s software handling them. If you could just follow an nntp link to a post on another newsgroup on another server, that could have allowed the same balance of powers blogs do—the blogger has total control of moderation on their own site, but the expectation is that people don’t just stay on one site and all the links make it easy to move between them.
As it was it felt like you had to stay in the same newsgroup if you wanted people to read your stuff. I think this meant you couldn’t have much moderation without feeling stifled, and also that newsgroups would grow large without being able to split easily.