I consider this post as related to @iamnotback's ban, and his complaint about this being a centralized discussion entity that makes banning of authors, instead of filtering messages, possible.



Well, these are "worries" that didn't ever pose a problem.  

1) Given the fact that an "identity" was just an e-mail address (and a name if you cared about it), it also meant that users KNEW this and hence didn't attach any particular value to that field: there was no point in "stealing an identity" because there wasn't any, so there was not this idiocy of creating "virtual important personalities with a reputation".   But of course, if you really wanted to prove an identity, nothing stopped you from signing a message.  In any case, messages were not meant to be kept, and discussion was ephemeral, unless you wanted to save old stuff yourself.    I think this was in fact a big advantage: the "identity" of the author didn't really matter, what mattered was what was said, and it only mattered for a limited amount of time, like oral conversations.  This limited naturally the "fake personality social value and reputation" because there wasn't really an avatar.  I have to say I've never seen abuse of this.  

2) There wasn't really a "future" or a "past".  There were just messages, threading together (you could of course only reply to an existing message, forming a reply tree ; and there were independent reply trees, taken together in "discussion groups").  You could configure your newsreader to keep a local copy of all the replies of a given tree, so that when these messages were purged from most of the servers, you still had a copy of what was discussed in those discussions you bothered to read.  

3) There was no need for any guarantee.   Of course, as an owner of a news server, you were free to relay or not what you wanted, but given that this was a decentralized system, a message would only not propagate if a LARGE MAJORITY of servers decided to not relay it ; there's a kind of "percolation limit" as to how many servers should ban a message before it gets effectively not propagated.  Note that bitcoin and other cryptos are not different: if the whole network decides to ban a transaction from propagating, it won't propagate.  But this didn't happen.  It did (openly) happen for whole discussion groups: many servers decided to only serve and propagate a limited list of groups ; but this was mainly for reasons of volume.
And of course, it is sufficient that one server contains a given message, and everyone can connect his reader to it to read it.  In other words, this was a true decentralized paradigm.

I have to say I liked usenet a lot, especially for these properties ; the very fact that discussions were essentially ephemeral, that there wasn't any "avatar personality reputation building" and other virtual nonsense, and that the system was simple and decentralized.

But it is clear that it died because people were looking for centralized authority, medals, moderators and the attraction of fake avatar personality building as a side effect of taking positions in discussions.  They wanted a "boss" to select for them what is correct content.  

Usenet wasn't a "database".  That's important. It was a *discussion* of which old interactions disappeared.  Even though this was only implemented for reasons of disk volume, this was in fact a good thing.  Archiving informal discussions is problematic, because in informal discussions, one can test ideas, take temporary positions, say sometimes stupid things ...  Archiving takes all this stuff and turns it into a kind of eternal social contract.  The strong linking between avatars and content makes that one focusses now more on the building of a reputation and the destruction of competitors' reputations, than to discuss about the content.  Whole strategies are now deployed to market or destroy avatars.  

Informal intellectual or recreational discussion shouldn't be a database, and authors of content shouldn't matter.   That was the good thing of usenet.   The bad thing, and why everyone left it, was that the uncensorable freedom to write gibberish made the exercise of reading discussions quite hard and time consuming ; so people preferred a trusted party to select the interesting parts for them ; at the same time, these selectors could "make" or "destroy" authors, which is what opened a market for "allowed posters" ; and, like in tribal acceptance, "being a member of a forum" meant somehow that you were part of those that were saying "important" stuff.  Forums replied with handing out medals, reputations, .... and all the other stuff authorities use to build a hierarchy, and users liked this.  That's how forums took over from usenet ; how a decentralized and free paradigm was set aside for the desire of authority, "social hierarchical recognition", "reputation building" and so on.

This is why I think that "decentralized stuff for the masses" is bullshit.  The masses want hierarchy, bosses and central authority.  Some of us, a small minority, don't.  And we should make our thing, but understand that we are a small, insignificant minority.

There are many indications that "the masses" want authority and prefer centralized paradigms over decentralized ones.  Because people like their own freedom, but they hate even more other peoples' freedom.  And they prefer easiness over freedom, and are willing to delegate trust if it makes life simpler.