One problem is that people couldn't really agree about spam and content moderation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelbot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cance

One problem is that people couldn't really agree about spam and content moderation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelbot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelbot Many Usenet users felt that there doesn't need to be a worldwide consensus about this (it's OK if different sites have different policies or different views of the contents of a newsgroup). However, the deployed attempts at antispam and content moderation through cancelbots and counter-cancelbots didn't scale very well or to many users' satisfaction. I also think that moderated groups had a challenge with authenticating moderation (to prevent people from spoofing approvals). Another scaling challenge, I think, is that Usenet originally had the model that there would be one single worldwide discussion forum about each topic. In later systems people often wanted friend-group-based, geographically-based, or project-based forums as well (although Usenet did end up having some of these, like organizationally-scoped news hierarchies!). It's daunting to imagine being on the one single worldwide talk.politics today.