I think you've proved my point there. People flocked to things like Reddit because they found it easier to use. And power users like us built tools to consume its API in a way that made sense to us. You may enjoy maintaining a killfile, but most people don't find regex particularly user friendly. And, as it turns out, many people rely on capricious mods (of whom there were none on Usenet, I'm sure...) to block things on their behalf. The customer is always right in matters of taste. And, for most people, Usenet left a bad taste in their mouth.