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Caspian comments on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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When the Web was born in 1990 or so, most of the discussion on the internet that LW readers would consider interesting or worthwhile occurred on newsgroups. (The other big chunk occurred in mailing lists.) In fact, starting in 1992 and continuing for many years, reading comp.arch and sci.military.moderated was my favorite way to learn about general rationality. (Discussions on those two newsgroups ranged over very many topics, much like discussion here does.)
I would be more enthusiastic about a proposal to add an NNTP interface to LW if the proposal explained why the newsgroups have drastically worsened and most of the interesting and worthwhile discussion now occurs on the web.
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.