3 ms·

After using this mess of website reddit I am wondering why people didn’t like usenet and prefer centralised private and censored services.

• smackeyacky 5y ago
  Usenet became unusable due to spam / people trolling with illegal material of the worst kind. You can kind of filter it or pay for a good Usenet provider to sort most of that out, but the good old days of being a Usenet node and having a manageable amount of traffic disappeared 25-30 years ago. The moderated platforms looked better (Slashdot for example) but the spammers and chancers ruined that too. As a link aggregator, Fark or Digg or (threw up in my mouth) 4Chan all either censored themselves stupid or became a cesspit of humanity that no self respecting adult could tolerate. Reddit looked like it might be able to find a way forward but as others have suggested, if your business model completely relies on your community doing your work for free, it is eventually doomed to fail as soon as it becomes popular because the amount of work becomes overwhelming. Yet we are stuck because the conclusion all these sites seem to come to (heavy, paid moderation) makes the sites so antiseptic they stop having anything interesting on them. The real answer seems to be: use it until it can't be used and move to the next thing when that happens. Reddit is not quite unuseable for the specialist subs but it's getting close.