Usenet cost was distributed to ISPs, which eventually sank it as they lost interest. And it never solved the moderator conundrum; at one point, a third of Usenet was spam, and another third was "spam cancels" deleting the spam.
I wish there was a Usenet client for iOS that matched the beauty and usability (and accessibility) of Apollo.
I wish there was Usenet servers to back that up - which didn't carry the binaries or unsavory newsgroups.
What does Reddit's core functionality cost? They have annual revenue of half a billion dollars. Tell me that you can't use that money to run a text distribution infrastructure.
I doubt Slashdot in its day cost half a million dollars to run.