Well... Spam was not a real thing at the usenet golden age, killfile largely suffice. Today thanks to the experience we have from emails we can easily apply ant

Well... Spam was not a real thing at the usenet golden age, killfile largely suffice. Today thanks to the experience we have from emails we can easily apply antispam to usenet. On rich text... Well, while I welcome an org-mode-formatted usenet I still do not see any point in having text formatting capabilities, most of formatted text on the web looks really ugly and it does not help reading. Also if we re-learn to write down text in terms of formatting (for instance knowing that more than 80 columns start to be hard to read, using short URLs etc), with the classic netiquette rules we write down better contents, and perhaps with more attention. Try only to compare readability of modern web-platforms respect of ancient usenet posts in a good client and also compare the "medium quality" of posts. Photos can be a problem often circumvented by base64-encode stuff, fidocad etc, however when you really need to insert an image or video in something you post? On upvotes, well personally I think gamification in general as a really bad idea and in general anything that pave the way to aggregators a bad idea. To let ideas, thoughts flow without soft-censorship we need to control us, individually, our information flow. That's why I favor RSS/Atom instead of modern aggregators, that's why I dislike HN interface etc. Generally speaking if you make a business well you have to follow or try to drive client's interests but if you make a free software o technical stuff you have to do what you think it's technically best, didactically best. Think for instance about child educations, or simpler think about Ubuntu's Unity desktop: nearly all of us GNU/Linux users from few years before Unity we start to put "launchers" on left or right side of the screen simply because we feel the need of more vertical space and we know that too long/big launchers list it's practically unuseful like having classic dummy users forest of desktop icons, we all have ha small top bar from Fluxbox to Gnome or Enlightenment. Unity devs see this and "force a bit" their users to choose this superior model. At first it was not much welcomed, now it's "The Standard" of modern GNU/Linux desktop, same for "hit a key, type something, hit enter on first mach" workflow vs classic menu-based searches. That's "education". Usenet is about users, a free software/protocol, not a commercial product. Of course it have rooms for improvements, but improvements does not means reinvent the wheel in a limited and anti-users way.