Usenet was arguably more centralised, limited, and <i>vastly</i> smaller in scale that Reddit.  (I know whereof I speak: I was there.)<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to come up with some metrics for the size of &quot;traditional&quot; Usenet -- Big 8 hierarchy, say, early 1990s.  Gene &quot;spaff&quot; Spafford thought that 50k - 500k users was probably in the right ballpark.<p>Note that to gain access you needed to be student or faculty at a research university, or work for one of a handful of tech companies (and almost certainly within their engineering divisions), or for a government agency with access.  Very limited independent options existed.<p>The Usenet Cabal who managed things, such as they were managed, was about the same size as Reddit&#x27;s technical staff, if that.<p>And the system proved highly vulnerable not only to spam and crap, but <i>to users not acculturated into the system itself, and behavior protocols.</i>  The Eternal September was a thing for a reason.