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It's been a good while, perhaps a decade now, since usenet was really a commonplace thing, so it's unlikely that anyone will ever flock there now. Usenet's dow
by bshimmin 11y ago
It's been a good while, perhaps a decade now, since usenet was really a commonplace thing, so it's unlikely that anyone will ever flock there now.
Usenet's downfall perhaps in part stems from its legacy as part of the "nice" era of computing's history, when it was just sort of assumed that everyone using computers were friendly people in academia and thus we didn't need to worry about bad people doing bad things. Some people would date Usenet's downward spiral as starting with Eternal September, but I think really it was just spam and binaries that killed it (the latter making usenet very expensive - and risky - for ISPs to offer as a service; which meant then looking for a (probably) paid-for alternative news provider).
Once people stopped using it, it became hard to see why it was good in the first place - and everybody by that point was doing everything through their web browser, and there never really was a great usenet experience through the web (certainly Google Groups wasn't it).