That’s just one side of the coin, though. While the binary tree played a role in the ”death” of the Usenet, services like AOL played another major role. Companies tried to make the internet more comprehensible for the average user and invented forms of communication that they thought of would be understandable by the masses and easier to sell (remember those pesky ”You’ve mail” AOL ads?).

Furthermore I don’t think it’s true that the Usenet is dead. There are still some active groups that rely on it. It’s just that there’s so much more these days. There are several social services competing with each other, there are a lot of web sites that let you discuss about things and are targeting specific niches.

Usenet wasn’t killed, it’s natural progress.