The one thing I think that's worth having about Usenet is its distributed nature. That makes it much more efficient and robust against technical failures. You can bring down an NNTP server or two, but that doesn't bring down all of Usenet. If we could just sort out the social engineering problems, it would be dandy.

BTW, K5 is having the same quality control problems as Usenet, despite a radically different operating paradigm and feature set. But we're not having problems here. Why is that? I think it's the selection of participants. We mostly work with computers FOR A LIVING, and are preconditioned by necessity to be both more logical, and less illogical, than the general populace, or the typical computer enthusiast, for that matter. That's the only variable I can find that maps to the different results.

And then there's Slashdot, which falls somewhere in between.