Usenet trumped Facebook

I find that discussions on Usenet when the Internet existed only in universities were more civil, thought-provoking and intelligent than what we have nowadays in facebook and other social media/forum sites, and I believe the reasons for this were mainly technical:

* Discussions were deeply threaded, while facebook allows only two levels of replies to exist * Messages could be very long without making the discussion any harder to follow * It was easy to scroll to older discussions, browsable by title (subject line) and searchable, like e-mail * They allowed users to post anonymously Perhaps in the future a modern forum website will replicate the above?