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.
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.
From what I've read, they're transferring multiple petabytes of data a day between different backbone NNTP server farms.
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.