I don't really agree, but also don't have a better explanation. Moderation and clients would have been solved, had Usenet continued to be huge. Email have had it's fair share of problems, including spam, but has always managed to survive because nothing has been able to replace it and it's still valuable. You could argue that development of attractive clients have died down in the past decade for email as well. Panic kept their Unison client alive for way longer than they needed to, and that looked pretty.
Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups. It seems like every small town have a Facebook group, and if you have no presents on Facebook, you get no information. Usenet would be a perfect fit, no central authority to monetize and control the group, you'd be able to read about activities in your neighborhood, while having no account or an account with an organisation you trust.
The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers, but they kept doing it for years after Usenet became a ghost town.
> Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups.
It actually happened the other way around. Local ISPs had newsgroups that had limited distribution where people local to you would post about upcoming events, things they were looking to rent or buy, things they wanted to sell, etc.
> The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers
There's nothing really stopping a local ISP from running a server that's not connected to an upstream feed and requiring credentials to post. That would be localized and a lot more relevant to those in the community if they really wanted a local discussion forum.
Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups. It seems like every small town have a Facebook group, and if you have no presents on Facebook, you get no information. Usenet would be a perfect fit, no central authority to monetize and control the group, you'd be able to read about activities in your neighborhood, while having no account or an account with an organisation you trust.
The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers, but they kept doing it for years after Usenet became a ghost town.