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by kjs3 70 days ago
it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.

Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.

1 comments

My experience in the 1990s was that that was a very excellent way to get all the Usenet users in your userbase to switch to some other ISP, which in turn meant there was little reason to waste all the energy on Usenet if you were going to do that, which contributed to the centralization of Usenet, a system that did not make sense once centralized and that subsequently collapsed into a shitty P2P piracy network.
I suppose I should be happy you didn't make out like we caused cancer and premature hair loss.
The people who ran partial-feed Usenet services? I think they're the actual heroes of the story, aren't they?