USENET failed? I was still an active user until the late 1990s, by which time it was nearly 20 years old. Many "successful" projects can only dream of a failure of that magnitude! And, I'm sorry, but I find the idea that Reddit's UX is better ridiculous. I only use Reddit because it's the closest thing that still exists to USENET, but with a larger userbase. It's hard to search with precision, upvoting gives undue weight to popular-but-incorrect viewpoints, and moderators are unresponsive, capricious, and unaccountable (give me my personally-maintained regex-powered killfile, any day). The only thing Reddit (and other privately owned online social media forums) have going for them is an audience. People go where people will read what they have to say, and where they can find other people with interesting things to say. As new Internet users gravitated to new platforms, so even us from the old guard found that the interesting conversations were no longer happening on USENET, and so its userbase declined, perhaps terminally. Given that decline, it shouldn't be a surprise that there hasn't been much innovation in FOSS NNTP clients. I will remind you that Thunderbird can still use NNTP, though!