One of the things it eventually became was the world's largest, fastest and most reliable media-pirating service, paid for and hosted by your ISP. Eventually th

One of the things it eventually became was the world's largest, fastest and most reliable media-pirating service, paid for and hosted by your ISP. Eventually the binary groups got dropped by ISPs, but you could pay to use someone else's servers and pull a couple hundred gigabytes of content at fiber speeds. This all while people were struggling for weeks to get a single torrent to finish. Of course, FXP servers and IRC D/C were the OG pirating method, but usenet binaries were accessible to pretty much anybody and in no way illegal ("I'm just downloading the news!"). Though it also seemed like nobody even noticed anything illegal was going on, because most people were stuck on P2P alternatives even though they sucked in comparison. I'm pretty sure Napster succeeded because normal people couldn't comprehend Usenet.