TL;DR Reddit is ****.
Listen to this history of reddit and decide for yourself:

phase 1: reddit started as a way for programmers and interesting people to share their cool projects, ideas, and findings with each other. nonstop OC and insightful comments with only a few jokes, most very relevant and amusing.

phase 2: people with nothing to contribute started visiting reddit because there was cool stuff here. they're not interesting themselves, but they appreciate interesting things. the quality of reddit stays high.

phase 3: digg died and reddit got flooded with people with nothing interesting to contribute. that's fine, however those people had a keen interest in stupid **** such as celebrities, pictures of animals, sob stories, bull**** debates on random points of etiquette, and participate in various forms of cyber bullying, clique forming, and useless inside jokes.

phase 4: all the values of the ****ty digg culture from before become reddit's new values. most of the original members of reddit who contributed interesting and valuable things are gone or turn into trolls. they are trolls because they can't help but mock all the stupid people who fill their old haunt.

phase 5: present reddit. nobody here is doing anything interesting or useful, and the site is entirely a platform for companies to sell and promote their **** to bored and dull people. reddit changed from an informal programming community into a reader's digest that pretends it's popular mechanics.

I often visit news.ycombinator.com, but since I don't work for a web startup, I basically have to ignore half of the posts there.

The smaller, focused subs are pretty good. The biggest thing I hate about reddit is that comments get hidden if they go against the prevailing consensus for a particular submission. No one follows reddiquette. They just downvote any opinion they remotely disagree with.

I honestly don't know the solution. SA is one of the only traditional-style forums I know of that is both popular and well-moderated.

As for whether the internet is getting stupider, well.. I happen to think that people are getting better in some ways (literacy rate for instance) but the problem is that the internet is in a period of rapid growth. And yeah, you're getting older and more tired of the juvenile ****.

Then you probably saw this. http://rs.io/2014/02/26/why-online-communities-decay-over-time.html

Then you probably saw this. http://rs.io/2014/02/26/why-online-communities-decay-over-time.html

There's not many ways to respond to that besides perpetually moving on

If this were Reddit, instead of you and I having a conversation, our comments would probably be buried by people with a lame sense of humor trying to impress each other with hopelessly pedestrian witticisms.

No online global discussion mechanism arisen to replace Usenet because there is no economic incentive for such a thing to exist.

It helps to ask the question, "why did Usenet exist in the first place?"

In the days before web browsers and before ubiquitous connectivity, the state of the art for engaging in electronic discussion was the dial-up bulletin board system. These systems generally had limited offerings, and a lot of them maintained overlapping subject matter with other systems. Long distance phone rates made calling made distant boards impractical. Discussion was typically local.

Email overcame the long distance call problem, with either hop by hop UUCP or direct-over-the-net SMTP. Mailing lists could emulate a discussion board, but they were, by definition, closed. Mail quotas were miniscule, reflecting the cost per megabyte of the day. Large mailing lists made mail server admins crazy, since replicated messages from a mailing list rapidly ate into mail spool space.

Usenet stepped in to fill the void by providing a public hierarchy of discussions that operated like open mailing lists while using less disk space. Usenet used transport mechanisms similar to mail (UUCP or NNTP) and allowed cooperating systems to replicate messages. Disk space and bandwidth usage could be controlled by picking the hierarchies of interest and managing how fast articles expired.

But Usenet's success was part of its its undoing. The list hierarchy exploded into deeper and deeper trees. No user or usage management existed due to Usenet's decentralized nature. Spam and trolls grew out of control and the signal to noise ratio became unbearable. Like SMTP, no sender authentication existed and the emergent ad-hoc security mechanisms devolved into fights among the most persistent.

The last newsreader I used when I read Usenet on a regular basis was called "nn" - Their motto was "No news is good news, but nn is better." The stated objective of nn was "NOT to read news," which reflected the fact that even as early as 1989 it was difficult to find the wheat among the chaff in the growing sea of sludge that was Usenet.

In the mean time, universal connectivity began to appear, and sophisticated web sites multiplied. Tired of the spam and trolls, people serious about having discussions retreated to a well managed walled gardens related to their interests. Text based discussion was no longer enough for most communities. Adjunct knowledge bases, blogs, databases, images or video archives turned out to be interesting adjuncts to discussion, depending on the topic at hand. Usenet had no modular mechanisms to grow in such a way, and could not adapt was fast as custom built web sites.

Content management of the walled gardens surpassed Usenet in leaps and bounds. People desired (and got) search capabilities and deeper storage than the article expiration window. User authentication and a foolproof banhammer mechanisms helped to keep discussion useful and sideline griefers and trolls. Different software systems evolved to maximize creation and consumption of content in the context of specific topics.

It turned out that people don't mind going to different places for discussion on different topics, especially when the content is well curated, the community is well behaved, and the presentation is optimized to the content at hand.

The social "feedback loop" that has evolved in discussion forums has also added value, allowing crowdsourced rating of content and crowd silencing of trolls. Different audiences have different value systems, so people will tend to gravitate to a place that supports their value systems. A universal online discussion forum might not provide a safe space to discuss controversial topics; the sharding of discussion becomes a feature in that case. (We can have a separate discussion about whether this is good or bad for society as a whole, but that's probably a whole Quora post by itself.)

I agree with Jimmy Wales - reddit is probably the closest thing we have to Usenet, and I never use it. I would also suggest that the troll population has found a cozy home in places like 4chan. Lots of big clusters of discussion still exist, but greater size leads to unbearable noise.

I think the Quoran asking the question may remember a time when Usenet was small and populated by a relatively homogenous population of academics, prior to Eternal September. The need is not for a universal discussion group, but a community of thoughtful and polite people to engage in discussion. And this is precisely why there is not a universal point-of-entry for discussions. I can argue that Usenet actually proved that point.

To summarize:

Usenet is a relic of another time which grew out of the technical limitations of the era. It was an improvement over the state of the art, but ultimately imploded as its success exposed its fatally weak foundational assumption that people could be trusted to be well behaved in large, anonymous groups.

A universal discussion forum covering all known topics is not very economically viable (or even technically feasible) due to the wildly diverse nature of each topic stream and the personality types that want to have those discussions.

As for whether the internet is getting stupider, well.. I happen to think that people are getting better in some ways (literacy rate for instance) but the problem is that the internet is in a period of rapid growth. And yeah, you're getting older and more tired of the juvenile ****.

I have this theory that YouTube comments actually broke through a previously-unbroken "floor" on the crappiness of comments on internet forums:

The reason is that before YouTube, you have to remember that video on the internet was relatively rare. You had all these codec and transmission problems, broadband was still pretty rare, and there were certainly very few central repositories available to the casual user. In this old world, most places where you could comment were textual in nature (forums, BBS, etc). The thing with text-oriented sites is that, no matter how stupid you are, you still have to be literate in order to participate. So you can be some kind of backwoods racist Neo-Nazi, but at least you are the guy writing their propaganda leaflets.

The thing is, we all thought that the population visiting and posting on these forums represented a full cross-section of humanity. Not so! Because you still had to be willing to read and write (however poorly) in order to participate, it still excluded the great mass of people for whom that is too much of a challenge, those who prefer to lie inert on their couches and have entertainment streamed to them via video. These people hadn't yet made it onto the participatory parts of the internet, or maybe just spent most of their time online looking at porn.

Enter YouTube. A new way for the masses to consume the internet, now presented in passive, video format. Suddenly all these video-oriented mostly-illiterate users had a new place to be, they could watch funny videos all day. They're not completely illiterate, of course - so when presented with a textbox beneath the video they're watching, they'll gladly mash some "lol whut herp derp" comment into it. So what Youtube actually achieved was bringing a new class of even more illiterate user onto the internet and getting them to join into the dialogue.

Oh, and I also had a look at /r/DepthHub, as well as /r/TrueReddit, which are supposedly centers of enlightened discussion on Reddit. Alas, I was disappointed with both. TrueReddit seems to lack the overtly pointless posts on regular Reddit, but the level of discourse in the comments still leaves a LOT to be desired. DepthHub seems nice in theory, but in practice I don't see much point in reading excessively long posts buried in some random / obscure thread.