Why did Usenet fail?
Usenet was - by the standards of the early 00&#x27;s, which is when it began to decline - slow, and asynchronous. Posts could take hours to days to propagate, which meant conversation threads would go off in multiple directions at once.<p>Technology that was transformative during the BBS-to-early-internet transition became a liability ten years on.<p>Slashdot, PHPBB and later on Reddit offered synchronous, low-latency, single-point-of-truth updates to thread&#x2F;post order.<p>The promise of self-configured &quot;agents&quot; for content filtering never really caught on - they were too time-consuming for anyone bar a few geeks and academics to manage. The social media &quot;feed&quot; is an evolution of the same idea, but there&#x27;s not really any self-configuration - instead the system is programmed by the platform&#x27;s owners to adapt to your behavioural feedback.