[oddthink]

Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam, at least not one that I knew about. It steadily became harder to find the signal in the noise.

It still had the best reader experience. I don't know why modern email clients, for example, don't look more like trn.

[DanBC]

Usenet had a strict definition for spam, which meant a bunch of stuff got through.

It was also under active attack from Hipcrime and similar.

And no matter how good the killfiles were there were people who wouldn't use them.

I agree about the clients - I really liked slrn.

[derleth]

> Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam

Nobody really does. The only way you can keep a channel spam-free is to have humans spend time monitoring it to keep the spam out, which is a huge cost asymmetry in favor of the spammers. Anything algorithmic gets gamed and, eventually, broken entirely.