Usenet

E-mail may have its advantages, but it doesn't work very well for general discussions, as it excludes anyone who isn't specifically invited into the discussion, preventing very large forums. To fill this need for world-wide forums, Usenet exists. Usenet is a hierarchy of newsgroups (with names like alt.humor.best.of.usenet or soc.couples.intercultural) to which users can post messages that will be passed on to other news servers so that users on remote systems can read and take part in the same discussion (and find other people who are interested in the topic of the newsgroup).