E-mail and Usenet (or even Fidonet, for that matter) were a vast UX improvement over Compuserve. Today's monopolized walled gardens are more like that Compuserve of old than a truly open ecosystem.
But I believe th UX of the modern monetized wallef garden would also have displaced CompuServe. Maybe CompuServe is a bad example because their UX was just poor (and they survived in an era of near zero competition).
