IMVHO the main points of usenet does not count much in archival terms, yes archives, especially personal ones, might be useful but that's just a nice addition,

IMVHO the main points of usenet does not count much in archival terms, yes archives, especially personal ones, might be useful but that's just a nice addition, the real "cultural" main points are IMO: - being property of no one, so no one can act as a general censor, we are all peers, between our peers, like we are/should be in a real democracy as Citizens, there are rules, there are "private" parts (groups) etc but we are ultimately free; - being decentralized, for similar reason, anyone can run a usenet server and many in the past have done that, again a guarantee of freedom; - being "local" in the sense that local client can archive messages, is the main UI etc, so we can change server from a third party ones to another to ours own one and nothing change in most cases, we have our messages, we read others messages etc. Those are the main technical points that still make usenet a good things too bad so many have forgotten. The humans one are: mixed people, on a group is common found a guru of the group main topic and newbies talking each others, benefiting each others: the guru understand what happen in the non-hi-culture world and newcomers benefit from guru teaching. In every fields. These days we have HN for some topics, Reddit for some other but nothing like usenet, generic and effective/specific at the same times. On usenet we have killfiles, groups, scoring, so we do have "filter bubbles" but not by someone else: our OWN personal bubbles we can change, know and control as we wish and that's a very big difference: usenet give something MORE than today's "recommendation engines"/"aggregators" while remain fully personal and free and that's the most important humans points. Having essentially lost that just because of eternal September and shiny new modern WebUI is really a shame, just like dropping gold because there is a bit of mud on it.