Usenet, as far as I remember, used to be a fucking hell to maintain right. With each server having to basically mirror everything, it was a hog on bandwidth and

Usenet, as far as I remember, used to be a fucking hell to maintain right. With each server having to basically mirror everything, it was a hog on bandwidth and storage, and most server software at its heyday was a hog on filesystems of its day (you had to make sure you have plenty of inodes to spare). The other day, I logged into Usenet using eternalseptember, and found out that it consisted in 95% of zombies sending spam you could recognize from the millenium start. On one hand, it made me feel pretty nostalgic. Yay, 9/11 conspiracy theories! Yay, more all-caps deranged Illuminati conspiracies! Yay, Nigerian princes! Yay, dick pills! And an occasional on-topic message which strangely felt out of place. On the other hand, I felt like I was in a half-dark mall bereft of most of its tenants, where the only place left is 85-year old watch repair shop and a photocopy service on the other end of the floor. On still another hand, turns out I haven't missed much by not being on Usenet, as all-caps deranged conspiracy shit is quite abound on Facebook. I would welcome a modern replacement for Usenet, but I feel like it would need a thorough redesign based on modern connectivity patterns and computing realities.