"Social media" to me refers only to services owned and controlled by a corporation (or maybe a non-profit organization similar to how the Guardian newpaper is owned by a non-profit) and targeted at average consumers, not just techies. Although there have been corporations (e.g., ISPs, Clarinet, Deja News) involved with Usenet, no one (corporation, organization, person) has ever owned or controlled Usenet. "The Big-8 board is the closest thing it has to a central governing authority," says the OP, but it has only a tiny fraction of the level of control over Usenet that, e.g., Reddit, Inc, has over Reddit.
Before the rise of the web, Usenet definitely was the front page of the internet, though--to a greater degree than Reddit ever was.
Part of the nostalgia for Usenet I think is nostalgia for a time when corporations had very little influence on the internet. Although most of the people running Usenet (and maintaining Usenet software) in the 1980s and early 1990s were involved with software and the Internet as part of their job, running Usenet was not part of their job description.
IRC and the first massively-multiplayer online games (which were text-only and called MUDs) were the same way.
Till the early 1990s the US government paid most of the bills for running the internet, but used its influence very sparingly: there was a rule against commercial activity (which I think was motivated by appeasing commercial interests worried that the internet would compete with their services) and there were attempts made to make it less likely that the internet would get criticized by Congresspersons and journalists as an expensive waste of money: e.g., Jerry Pournelle's getting kicked off MIT's terminal servers circa 1985 out of fear that he would be careless in how he would write about the internet. And that is the extent of the rules imposed by the US gov that I know about.
I think early on, there was no front page of the internet. It would have been your university's telnet or gopher server or something. But really there wasn't one. I don't think it was Usenet, certainly. With the early web, Yahoo might have been the closest thing. I don't think there could be anything like centralization or aggregation (I mean: a single place people went to by default) until the browser became ubiquitous, which in my personal history marks the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the middle phase of the internet. I agree that many people spent a lot of time on Usenet, but I think many more people couldn't be bothered.
I learned basic scripting by writing rooms and content for MUDs, I love them and sometimes wistfully think about starting one up.
Before the rise of the web, Usenet definitely was the front page of the internet, though--to a greater degree than Reddit ever was.
Part of the nostalgia for Usenet I think is nostalgia for a time when corporations had very little influence on the internet. Although most of the people running Usenet (and maintaining Usenet software) in the 1980s and early 1990s were involved with software and the Internet as part of their job, running Usenet was not part of their job description.
IRC and the first massively-multiplayer online games (which were text-only and called MUDs) were the same way.
Till the early 1990s the US government paid most of the bills for running the internet, but used its influence very sparingly: there was a rule against commercial activity (which I think was motivated by appeasing commercial interests worried that the internet would compete with their services) and there were attempts made to make it less likely that the internet would get criticized by Congresspersons and journalists as an expensive waste of money: e.g., Jerry Pournelle's getting kicked off MIT's terminal servers circa 1985 out of fear that he would be careless in how he would write about the internet. And that is the extent of the rules imposed by the US gov that I know about.