>The idea that no one was bigger than any given (news)group was baked directly into the software. Everyone held the keys to the castle. [...] Sadly, it seems we’ve given up on the idea of online communities as shared spaces — but studying Usenet is a great way to be reminded of what’s possible.

I took the opposite lesson from USENET history: shared spaces where _everyone_ has equal say and power is _impossible_.

(Much of my thinking in the following paragraphs is influenced by Clay Shirky but his essay seems to be deleted from the internet.[1])

Any digital shared space that needs to function for the long term will always create a formal (or informal) power structure where a subset have disproportionate influence. Therefore, any idealism of a shared space where everyone has equal say or power will devolve into unequal power. This has happened with all "digital shared spaces" of any significance outside of USENET such as Bitcoin (democratic home computers --> China ASIC miners), or Ethereum (a few influential developers choose to reverse the DAO hack), or Wikipedia (super editors with special powers to reverse edits). The repetition of that human history across many digital domains shows that only a subset will hold the keys to the castle.

I was an avid user of USENET in the 1980s. I learned C Language by asking questions in USENET (comp.lang.c). I also had my first long discussions on economics on USENET. I have a fondness for nostalgia but that doesn't change the fact that reddit/Stackoverflow/HN are far more useful to me than USENET ever was. I think that private ownership of those entities improves baseline quality of discussion. Sure, Mastodon is decentralized but the discussions there are not as interesting to me as the front page of HN. We techies don't like to admit that decentralization makes shared spaces worse on many dimensions which is why I abandoned USENET because it wasted too much of my reading time.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enem...