I feel that the Usenet protocol in hand with today's technologies should be amazing. It should be possible to make a very powerful client that summarizes groups discussions say, by day/week; filters spam pretty aggressively and sorts or "mutes" known trolls or bad users.

The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet.