[sumtechguy]

spam murdered it.

It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.

Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.

Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.

[BeetleB]

This.

I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.

When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.

And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.

The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.

[cmacleod4]

Spam fell off drastically after Google Groups disconnected from Usenet a couple of years ago.

[tptacek]

Binaries killed Usenet, not spam.

[jghn]

Little bit of both. From my own anecdata, most people I knew left usenet due to spam problems. Most of the people who did not were primarily the ones using it for binaries. And then yes, the binary angle started the trend where ISPs stopped offering it altogether, which even further reduced the likelihood that people would use it.

And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries

[DamonHD]

I had to selectively stop carrying parts of USENET (I ran what was briefly a fairly important node globally) because of the volume of the binaries, and various sex and bestiality groups (probably still including some badly-scanned ASCII-rendered images!