It's kind of amazing that no forum or other communications system developed in the past 20 years has been as good as USENET (either in the late 1980s, or with a good client with killfiles, global cancels, etc.).
Well, that just concentrates on the good parts of USENET. The spammers had a field day with it and pretty much destroyed it. Maybe there is an opportunity here in the form of something halfway between a moderated forum and USENET.
You could piggyback this onto bitcoin, make a client that listens to specific messages to identify channels embedded in the blockchain? Every message would have to be a payment to a specific address to get a message onto the channel, the moderator(s) of the channel would be the recipient(s) of the bitcoins in reward for moderating the channel.
If a moderator decided to 'kill' a post they'd have to make another message to the same channel so for them (minus transaction costs) it would be a '0' affair.
Before the green card lottery , I don't remember any commercial spam; the worst thing was stupid cross posts (easy to kill) and specific moron posters (kill files). The biggest problem I had was a lot of content which didn't make sense to me (cfps and such) since I wasn't even a teenager, but which came from good posters.
But the green card lottery was shortly after commercial speech was allowed on the Internet, and everything went downhill after that. Even the WWW feels sub-optimal if you want to find information.
