Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is.
Allegra Rosenberg has a good explanation, and she continues with a meditation on misconceptions that Generation Z have about life in the 90s and 2000s.
This misunderstanding is not unique to GenZ; I think it’s a phenomenon of being in one’s 20s. I remember reading Dickens (possibly “David Copperfield”) and coming across a casual mention of the main character sending his wife a letter one morning — he worked on one side of London, lived on another side, and expected the letter to arrive that afternoon. Mail delivery in London at that time was twice a day; people used the post like texting or email today — it was slower of course but you could still count on getting a message to someone the same day. I found that fascinating!
Rosenberg doesn’t mention Reddit. I think a good explanation of Usenet is that it was like Reddit but it was primarily text-based and complete distributed. It was not owned by a single company.