Usenet still exists though?

Plus the vast vast majority of reddit content consists of mindless nonsense, or even worse, so it's probably best that USENET didn't continue growing in popularity.

Yes Usenet is still around, it mainly for the downloading "LinuxISO's™"

> mindless nonsense

That's the vast majority of anything (aka Sturgeon's Law).

Soon to be "improved by AI".

Not really.

Or more precisely, it was great when the internet was small and people were mostly well behaved. And as forums and then platforms with easier access and better moderation tools took over, it became nothing but spam, only leaving alt.binaries, so much that many people saw USENET as just a network for piracy, like The Pirate Bay or Megaupload.

I don’t know about the better moderation part. With the right reader one could subscribe to a moderator of choice. That’s an elegant feature I’ve never seen anywhere since.