Usenet Oracle
A collective oracle by email, where every supplicant had to answer someone else's question before receiving an answer of their own.
Steve Kinzler at Indiana University started it in 1989. You mailed a question to the Oracle, and the system sent back another user's question for you to answer in the Oracle's voice. Your own answer came from a stranger who had done the same. Etiquette demanded grovelling; supplicants who failed to grovel could expect a reply that punished the lapse.
The best exchanges were collected into issues called "Oracularities" and posted to rec.humor.oracle. It was crowdsourcing before the word existed, and the quality varied exactly as you'd expect when every answer is written by whoever happens to be next in the queue.