I miss pre-commercial Usenet too. But I think it was a completely different feel than HN/Reddit. You could surf the net for a couple hours, engage in a long-form argument, forget about it and come back a couple days later to reply. It wasn't like this where I'm replying to your "28 minutes ago" post.

Also the environment was completely different. When people talk about Linus Torvalds being mean, there were a lot of people back then who had the mentality "I'm going to flame this moron off the Internet." I like the more friendly confines of HN.

My take is Usenet was not so much killed by spam, but the lack of moderation. Eventually the unchecked kooks, flamers, stalkers, and etc made it uninhabitable.