+1... I've said here repeatedly that Usenet and Usenet readers were, 15 years ago, way more advanced than things people are using now. Questions about, say, Java in comp.lang.java.^ were leading to more interesting answers than what is available today in SO.

And, more importantly, it was so easy to follow a gigantic amount of threads and find the information that would likely be of interest to you.

Sure this required good readers and users willing to learn to use these but as a result it was incredibly more useful than what we have today. There were some people who simply geniuses and who were explaining things in great way: it was very easy to assign them good scores so that their interventions would stand out.

What do we have today? Inferior crap like StackOverflow because, supposedly, users would be too lazy to learn to use powerful functionalities.

I'm pretty sure one day we'll get some "Gnus meet StackOverflow" webapp which is going to rock our world. I can't wait for the next big thing because honestly we've made a gigantic step backward.