Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
> The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.
Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.
On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.
The karma system is definitely the difference that mostly influences the quality of the discussion and visibility of non mainstream topics.
Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.
Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.