[dsr_]

That was, in fact, my point.

Most discussion systems are inferior to 1990 Usenet, 34 years later.

At this point it is traditional to shout about Usenet not having good moderation. In fact, it is possible for either individual news groups or specific news servers (that only carry a limited number of groups) to have good moderation. It is, of course, expensive: you need to get enough trustworthy people to run it to cover the time and volume.

Then someone will sniff about not wanting to use a TUI, which can be rebutted by pointing at all the GUI newsreaders -- having a standard protocol for talking to a server is quite valuable.

"Isn't Usenet a huge space and bandwidth hog?" Yes, Usenet was a huge space and bandwidth hog -- in 1990, and 2000. If you don't carry the warez groups, it can be adequately handled on a high-end server from 2000 -- which today is equivalent to a Raspberry Pi. (1994: 7 x 2 GB SCSI disks, 1.5Mb/s Internet connection)

HN approximates the activity level and content size of 1 very active Usenet newsgroup.