Usenet was also censored. Like Reddit, much of it was a free-for-all, but not all of it.
But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet.
Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet.
But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet.
Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet.