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I have a lot of positive feelings for Usenet, but it wasn't because of the lack of central control. Most of the positive was that the internet was smaller, and

I have a lot of positive feelings for Usenet, but it wasn't because of the lack of central control. Most of the positive was that the internet was smaller, and the people on Usenet were often very influential. I got to talk to movie producers, scientists, business executives, rock stars and lots of very engaged, interested regular people. The problem with Usenet was that it was that it slowly was infested with pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers. Don't forget the mentally ill, who ruined a lot of science newsgroups. It became hard to find solid discussion among university-employed experts once the newsgroup attracted cranks who wanted to propound their ideas, e.g. "Perpetual motion machines are possible!" or "I have deciphered Linear A!" Even if you killfiled the mentally ill, a lot of the experts got bogged down in pointlessly trying to refute the cranks, so you would see their replies and it totally destroyed the group's culture. That said, I am not sure why you find pirates a problem. Sharing binaries actually goes back to the golden age of Usenet, before Eternal September.
- indymike 7y ago
  There were quite a few enthusiastic believers in the impossible, but that happens in real life, too. The reason pirates were a problem was they were the excuse for removing Usenet as a service for ISPs. Binaries were most of the bandwidth, legal and storage cost.