Reddit has a large user base and a myriad of subreddits where different solutions have been tried. So far, the best I've seen is strong moderation: clear rules and swift enforcement.
AskScience is a shining example of a high quality subreddit, although the comment section usually looks like a graveyard with 90% of the comments removed.
I'd like to see moderation decoupled from the forum namespace.
So you'd subscribe to a forum namespace in order to see posts about a topic (say, AskScience), but you would then also subscribe to whichever moderators you want. The moderation wouldn't be inextricably tied to the namespace.
Anybody can post anything in any namespace (and anybody can declare themselves a moderator of any namespace), but people will only see posts if their chosen moderators allow it. You could have all of the same moderation powers that exist at the moment, except any given moderator's actions are optional to any given user's view of the forum.
We wouldn't need a situation like with r/bitcoin and r/btc where disagreements about moderation resulted in a splinter group creating a separate namespace: those who disagreed with moderator X would simply unsubscribe from X's moderation.
I don't know if this would result in a better forum, but I'd be interested to see how it's different, and I don't know of anywhere it's been tried.
(And in case someone out there is granting wishes... can I also have it decentralised e.g. using IPFS's pub sub?)
Spam was and still is a nassive headache. However Bayesian filters were really starting up. But Spam was annoying at best.
What caused Usenet servers to be quit was that ISP's were seeing them as a pirate haven and a lawsuit magnet. There was all the impetus to stop supporting piracy, and lose the costs incurred with that bandwidth to a Usenet server.
Sure, it was a great draw to use it to pirate... but it is also why it fell. Now these days, time to move to IPFS. That place is ripe for piracy, and super simple to share.
But then somehow a few "bad guys" get to become moderators and everything goes back to s*it. As someone has said above, it's all about the incentives. No-one has enough reasons or available resources to want to take over an obscure sub-reddit with almost no real-world influence, but when there are State actors involved you can be sure that things will turn sour. My most recent such experience is with /r/syriancivilwar, which used to be decent enough two or three years ago (even if some of the posters had actual ISIS flares), but since the troups-on-the-ground involvement of both Russia and Turkey the sub-reddit has become an echo chamber for those interests.
AskScience is a shining example of a high quality subreddit, although the comment section usually looks like a graveyard with 90% of the comments removed.