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Re:Why Did Usenet Fail? by Delphiza on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:59AM (#36197106)
alt.binaries killed usenet.

Apart from pron clogging up bandwidth, alt.binaries became a good vector to distribute viruses, child pron, and a bunch of other things that ISPs, and their dial-up customers, were becoming increasingly concerned about. Its openness in an increasingly more dangerous, scammy, and criminal world was always going to be its own undoing. There must have been a stage where Pamela Anderson took up most of the world's storage and bandwidth just from synchronising usenet feeds.

Re:Why Did Usenet Fail? by temporal828 on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:16AM (#36197410)
> alt.binaries killed usenet.

In 2023 Usenet is solely commercially viable for alt.binaries.

Re:Why Did Usenet Fail? by korse on Monday June 05, 2023 @12:12PM (#36198452)
I'm surprised people aren't mentioning this more. Usenet may be dead for discussion, but it certainly isn't a dead technology.

edit: I guess they are. Took a second to search around the comments.

Re:Why Did Usenet Fail? by u801e on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @01:03AM (#36208317)
From what I've read, they're transferring multiple petabytes of data a day between different backbone NNTP server farms.
Re:Why Did Usenet Fail? by korse on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @11:14AM (#36311449)
This is true. Pretty much all alt.binaries though and there is an interesting ecosystem of tools, forums and providers that you need to be aware of in order to access content.