There was another reason Usenet died -- people want other people to do the work. Oh, they'll pay for it to a degree, but Usenet wasn't plug-and-play. To make Usenet work, everyone had to cooperate and most people just don't want the work. AOL wasn't even close, but it was someone else's problem to run and maintain. Hostly, my own vies here, but if Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece. I remember running a node -- it was a constant battle to maintain space on the spools and deal with my own users. And, for what? It cost us money and while everyone said they wanted it, no one wanted to help with the work or pay for it. Add to that the number of groups that just want "zombie" on us, and it died.