Yes. If I could have one thing back from old internet, Usenet might be it. Loved the discussions and sense of community.
The closest thing I've found to USENET, unsurprinsgly, has been Reddit. But it's still a poor facsimile. I spent hours a day, every day, on USENET in the 90s. I'd scroll around the feed of group names and see things like alt.sex.bald.captains or alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die and have to go check it out.
I haven't spent much time on Reddit, but for me, Hacker News is close to USENET in terms of signal/noise. It doesn't have the subgroups covering every topic, but for what it does cover, it's a great source of interesting information with minimal noise. The karma system seems to help a lot in that respect.
The reason I find Reddit more similar is there are near infinite subreddits and they vary wildly in quality. That was exactly my experience with newsgroups
I wasn't around then, but I have read some usenet stuff, and the theory of peak "useful information density" does check out.
But then my thought is - how could this be re-created?
We have the technology. And there's definitely still a lot of smart & interesting people who talk about things online.
The barrier to entry meant those who got access were likely already invested in keeping it a valuable space.
I think there must be some potential for a usenet revival. The infrastructure is all still there. The binary groups are still flowing with gigabytes of piracy and porn. With some exceptions, most of the text groups are wastelands inhabited only by a few spammers and cranks. There are a few operators who try to preserve the original vision, e.g. eternal-september.org .
It's still a potentially useful discussion system, based on open and documented standards, with no greedy corporation or psychopathic billionaire in charge to run it into the ground. I really think it could be worth doing some brainstorming to try to figure out how to bring it back to life.
[1] "Boxed" for each user, instead of a gimmicked model that just feeds you crap.