[InclinedPlane]

I'm not sure that usenet 2.0 is even possible, just merely due to scale, although it would be nice if it did.

I was very active on usenet back in the early to mid 1990s and I would say that it was an enormously valuable experience. I interacted with a lot of smart people, I got to explore a lot of exciting areas of interest, and I spent a lot of time improving my writing abilities. It makes me sad to think that there are lots of people who well never benefit from that experience. At their best HN and parts of reddit can be excellent, but there's still a lot that they're missing.

[deftnerd]

USENET 2.0 could be set up so only headers are transferred. Then third party groups could publish moderation whitelists that the USENET provider to subscribe to. If a moderated whitelist approves some content, then the server would download it via DHT so its locally available. If a user requests something in a header that hasn't been filled yet because it's not moderated by an approved whitelist, it would download it and then serve it to the user.

This would make it so content that's purely spam wouldn't be pulled to all the USENET servers. If a moderation provider started vouching for a lot of spam, it would quickly be removed by providers.