I think reddit is a superior product to Usenet. I used to use Usenet in the early 90s, I was even a sysadmin at the time and helped my university install it. N

I think reddit is a superior product to Usenet. I used to use Usenet in the early 90s, I was even a sysadmin at the time and helped my university install it. NNTP, huge hard drives, constant network stream, it was a big deal but so excited to manage and read it. But I quickly felt the need to have some kind of upvoting system in order to wade through the noise. At the time, I used jwz' genius "BBDB" emacs extension, which allowed you to weigh posts based on authors and subjects. The potentially most interesting articles would magically bubble at the top of the discussion group and this would tremendously speed up my consumption of all the groups. But obviously, this is not as effective as the crowdsource voting system that reddit uses. The combination of reddit's voting system (for the voting) and RES (for the customized author tagging) makes the reading a lot more efficient than Usenet ever was. I personally don't have a problem with the fact that reddit is proprietary. The amount of knowledge and entertainment that I gain from reddit way outweighs my slight philosophical discomfort from the proprietary aspect. And if one day, reddit fails to meet that criterion, another site will replace it. Digg has shown us that these sites are a lot less permanent than they seem.