I was on USENET from '89-2005-ish, on various Unix versions. I used trn until strn came out; it has an amazingly useful threaded display, where you can move around posts on a big branching thread to follow replies. strn added scoring, so a file full of rules would up and downvote things (privately) so I'd only see the good stuff up top, and never see a lot of obvious garbage.

There were less capable clients for Windows & such, but if you had the choice you used a text-mode Unix client.

September That Never Ended wasn't great, AOLers were really terrible, but now the entire Internet is AOL-quality, so I doubt it'll make much difference.