I listened to Spolsky's talk on "community" style interfaces at SDMagazine where he discussed products like IM, usenet, etc.. He had some interesting usenet history and how the interface has been carried forward (unfortunately) in other applications.
I enjoyed the talk and submitted one question that I wish he had addressed. It seemed to me that all of his recommendations revolved around the basic coding idea of “get out of the way” - or - essentially that programmatically trying to format communications to improve readability as a rule does just the opposite. I think that's a good message - provide the tools that allow the user to express their ideas/thoughts in their own manner (within reason) and publish that content in a sequential, ordered manner. I'm not sure if that's an oversimplification, but the ramfications of making process assumptions and rigidity with this type of software can quickly marginalize the content value. I've always believed that the NewsGroup/NNTP world is largely unusuable - it's valuable but I believe the publishing format leads to horribly disjointed conversations and a lot of poorly answered questions.