Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usenet? The more I think about it, Reddit is just Usenet with better moderation and voting. The voting doesn't make that much sense in the smaller sub-reddits where you'd typically read all the posts anyway. So that basically just leaves you with building better moderation. Still a hard problem, but not impossible. If we had spent the time building better NNTP clients, rather than trying to integrate with the API of…
NNTP was a bit of a dumpster fire though. Each ISP carrying some groups, or none at all, losing messages left and right ... Those problems cannot be solved with a better client, they were fundamental issues. Now, if you had said "if we had spent the time building a better NNTP protocol and servers", I would have agreed. In the end, that's basically what the fediverse is.
I feel like it would have been easier to fix NNTP. It had at least a clear focus.