Usenet was incredible. For me it was like discovering Hacker News, but not just on a single topic, on any topic I could imagine. For those that never used Usenet it was a distributed point to point discussion system. Through your client you would download any updates of the forums you subscribed, and uploaded any new posts/replies. The server periodically synchronized with other servers.

Because of its distributed and assumed trust nature there were no built in safeguards to combat spam. Over time spam increased, a tolerable amount at first. But, the problem grew until it killed the utility of the service.

The closest analogy to usenet today is Reddit. Where we've normalized spam into a tolerable number of advertisements. Where we've traded off distributed systems to a single corporate control. The distributed nature meant you had multiple competing clients, corporate control today means you access through whatever mechanism the company authorizes.

I miss usenet.