[joecool1029]

>This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

Usenet had a nonstop spam generator called Google Groups that shit it up for years. It wasn't just intentional spam but clueless people came in through there and bumped 20+ year old threads.

The other factor related to the decline was ISP's stopped bundling usenet service in the 2000's.

There are sill a handful of active groups but unfortunately at least a third of the remaining active lost access when the Google spam service stopped.

[MichaelZuo]

It may have been reasonable to assume away or ignore that people with bad motives will be able to access the internet in the 80s and even 90s.

But continuining to ignore it into the 2000s was clearly nonsensical.