News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix. Parent comment

Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by vidarh on Thursday August 31, 2023 @05:01PM (#37343622)
It was expensive. I ran an ISP on the mid 90s, and it took up an expensive server and a disproportionate amount of my time to ensure we had good enough feeds for people to be happy, and so the moment demand was dropping it was very high on the list of things to get rid of.

Had peering been more on demand, rather than a firehouse, maybe people would have kept them longer.

I for a while worked on an aggressively caching NNTP server as an option because of the costs involved.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by bsder on Thursday August 31, 2023 @06:35PM (#37344499)
Yeah, people forget just how expensive both bandwidth and storage were in the late 1990s.

YouTube appeared in 2005 and was losing VAST amounts of money before Google bought them out. So, even in 2005, Usenet probably was still too expensive.

[ Parent | on HN ]