The root problem was abusive posts, spam and bandwidth use (for binaries). These are still problems today, even with centralized identity and reputation managem

The root problem was abusive posts, spam and bandwidth use (for binaries). These are still problems today, even with centralized identity and reputation management. Incidentally, PGP/GPG use was surprisingly high on Usenet (nowhere near ubiquitous) back then. Many newsreaders supported it was pretty common to see signed messages and the corresponding geek code block. It did little other than help resolve arguments about spoofed messages... and as a badge of geek cred.