I loved how efficient it was. Unfortunately, that was also the downfall as it allowed people to spam efficiently.
I'm still bummed that everything went to the web instead of trying to fix the moderation problem on the Usenet. I have never seen an online discussion forum as fast and featureful as my old Usenet client.
Reddit, despite its own flaws, is the closest thing to Usenet in terms of a text-oriented display with keyboard-heavy navigation (with Reddit Enhancement Suite).
I prefer uncensored.citadel.org. Yes, no https support, but you can login over SSH with ssh bbs@uncensored.citadel.org
and use it as a modern BBS. It works great.
I'm not in love with the interface to be honest. It's great if you want to consume absolutely everything, but if you want to pick and choose in a topic thread there isn't a summary view as far as I can tell. It's kind of like reading specific #hashtags on Twitter.
no, that didn't work. and that's a lot of the reason that usenet died.
no matter how many of the regulars in any given group might killfile the local trolls, there was always at least a few people that did almost nothing but spar with them, filling the group with information-free dross that nobody sane was interested in. and there was nothing stopping the trolls from mutating their email addresses frequently, in an attempt to evade killfiles.
hacker news is more-or-less drama-free because the mods have the power to remove disruptive users. if you'd try to apply a killfile-like solution here, HN would be long dead by now.
More realistically, for all the places where a web-of-trust model fails moderation seems like the perfect fit for it. I see no reason we can't have multiple teams of moderators whitelisting/blacklisting different content in the same namespace, with their changes applied only to users who opt-in.
Federated accounts between servers might be a nice overlay feature set. Servers can just reject mail from any unauthenticated user, and sync user databases periodically.
Federated moderation enables extremists to blacklist people who endorse something they don't personally like and limit their ability to use other sites.
I'm still bummed that everything went to the web instead of trying to fix the moderation problem on the Usenet. I have never seen an online discussion forum as fast and featureful as my old Usenet client.