Update: I actually used Usenet a bit yesterday, mostly reading administrators explaining how the system works, and deleting spam. It's a cool system, I guess.
It should be possible to have other things built on top of the protocol. The protocol is a store-and-forward broadcast system, and is mostly agnostic to what goes in the packets, although if you want to add a group, each server operator has to agree to carry it, and they can have server-specific restrictions on things like message sizes, dropping messages outside the limits, so it isn't reliable. If you wanted to make a Usenet group simulating Reddit, you could easily pass votes through the system. Clients would have to interpret them, so you'd have to write your own client.
It's tolerant of spam as long as it isn't extremely excessive. There was talk of de-peering Google due to a large volume of spam, before Google made the decision itself, but most groups are about half spam besides that. The low volume of actual users contributes to this.
There's a group, I think news.admin.peering, for requesting your own server to be connected to the network. I see many successful requests from various people in the group's history. The network is fully decentralized, so being connected is reliant on at least one other person being willing to connect to you.
It should be possible to have other things built on top of the protocol. The protocol is a store-and-forward broadcast system, and is mostly agnostic to what goes in the packets, although if you want to add a group, each server operator has to agree to carry it, and they can have server-specific restrictions on things like message sizes, dropping messages outside the limits, so it isn't reliable. If you wanted to make a Usenet group simulating Reddit, you could easily pass votes through the system. Clients would have to interpret them, so you'd have to write your own client.
It's tolerant of spam as long as it isn't extremely excessive. There was talk of de-peering Google due to a large volume of spam, before Google made the decision itself, but most groups are about half spam besides that. The low volume of actual users contributes to this.
There's a group, I think news.admin.peering, for requesting your own server to be connected to the network. I see many successful requests from various people in the group's history. The network is fully decentralized, so being connected is reliant on at least one other person being willing to connect to you.