I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums.
I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp. The spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet. One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. Aggregators can occupy public keys as their "address" and any aggregator that gets obnoxious, you just trim it from your list, which only contains things you've either let in or accepted via slates or whitelists.
Then the spammers can do whatever they like, really. I believe the main reason usenet faded so thoroughly was that it became a piracy distribution platform very early on not sure which came first, the pirate booty or the porn booty, but I'm guessing porn , and very quickly there came a kind of unspoken "don't talk about usenet" code among those who already knew about it. At the time, Napster and bittorrent were the main targets of the authorities and IP trolls and usenet was just doing a Jim-From-The-Office-smirking-through-the-blinds.
Technical people were "above" AOL and so those Usenet communities survived a few more years, but ultimately succumbed to web forums which were superior to Usenet in almost every way. Unfortunately, web forums were mostly hollowed out due to social media, and now that people are sick and tired of that, the simplicity and "innocence" of early 's forums, and even 90s Usenet, seems appealing although tinted by rose-colored nostalgic glasses.
Just my opinion but I can't think of a single way in which I found web forums of the early s to be superior to usenet. MetaWhirledPeas on Aug 31, root parent next [β]. A novice could type something into Web Crawler and get a forum back as a search result.
