8 ms·

Usenet was destroyed by spam. Even if you set up your client to have your groups clean, for any new arrival without guidance it was a horrible experience that

• throwaway81523 4y ago
  Usenet had spam filtering that was at least somewhat decentralized and that worked, though maybe not fully distributed. Some alt groups that didn't use it became unusable, and a few groups (sci.crypt) were intentionally destroyed by sporgery that was hard to stop by filters. There were also moderated groups that were hard to spam because of cryptographic signatures in the moderation approval. IIRC the signatures were 512 bit RSA, so maybe the keys can be cracked by now. I think spam may have been less of an issue than the exploding size of binary newsgroups used for distributing warez and pr0n. That is a big reason ISP's gave up on it. Plus politicians like NY Gov Cuomo (not sure which Gov Cuomo, there were two that I know of) crusaded against it since OMG people could post anonymously. I think Usenet with a few adjustments for velocity control is still a perfectly viable scheme. Every time I look at BBS software and think about how to do it better, the answer turns out to be Usenet. If you read the novel "A Fire Upon The Deep" you might be amused to find that in it, Usenet still exists in an era of interstellar travel.