Nauseating. Piracy killed the real Usenet, and now pirates are upset that enforcement is killing the goofy little playground they built inside its corpse.
When I was 18, I ran a competitive (on the Freenix leaderboard) full-feed Usenet server for the ISP I worked at. Every ISP in the world could have provided full-feed Usenet access, but for the assholes who loaded the system down with ASCII-encoded binaries. Even while it was possible for an independent provider to offer Usenet to customers, it was still a total nightmare because of the ludicrous storage requirements for binaries, which ensured that only an ever-dwindling number of providers would take the time to offer it at all.
It's startling to me that there's a Usenet at all anymore, since it's essentially been reduced to a collaborative system for sharing pirated binaries.
I was also running a news server for my school and an ISP around the same time (1994-1996). The alt.binaries hierarchy was a constant headache. The total data flow and storage requirements were already about 10X the rest of Usenet. We had to manually tweak refuse lists when the disk drives filled up.
I wasn't still around, but I expect the second wave of automated binary posting/retrieval tools in the late 90's probably created the surge that changed Usenet access into a separate paid service, no longer something that came with an ISP account like email.
However, it wasn't just warez and porn that killed Usenet. Spam took off there before email, and it wasn't until email spam became untenable that modern automated filtering tools were created.
Why did you have to include alt.binaries.? I thought the alt. hierarchy was basically optional, and it was the news server admin's prerogative to opt in and out of alt.* groups.
So I am chuckling at the idea that some young guns who want to be "free" to do what ever they want in their network of computers to come up with a scheme where they are will use telephones to call up one computer to the next, and addressing will be free form a series of "hops" where you tell the computer what sequence of machines will have to be called in order to get your message from you to your destination. You could use a character like ! to separate the hops making an address 'bobs-machine!piratebay!alices-machine!alice' delivering through three hops to Alice.
We'll also need something to deal with these high-latency links. A piece of hardware which generates the ACKs locally so our computers will send faster will sell like gangbusters! It'll really pep up the connections.
That’s just one side of the coin, though. While the binary tree played a role in the ”death” of the Usenet, services like AOL played another major role. Companies tried to make the internet more comprehensible for the average user and invented forms of communication that they thought of would be understandable by the masses and easier to sell (remember those pesky ”You’ve mail” AOL ads?).
Furthermore I don’t think it’s true that the Usenet is dead. There are still some active groups that rely on it. It’s just that there’s so much more these days. There are several social services competing with each other, there are a lot of web sites that let you discuss about things and are targeting specific niches.
When I was 18, I ran a competitive (on the Freenix leaderboard) full-feed Usenet server for the ISP I worked at. Every ISP in the world could have provided full-feed Usenet access, but for the assholes who loaded the system down with ASCII-encoded binaries. Even while it was possible for an independent provider to offer Usenet to customers, it was still a total nightmare because of the ludicrous storage requirements for binaries, which ensured that only an ever-dwindling number of providers would take the time to offer it at all.
It's startling to me that there's a Usenet at all anymore, since it's essentially been reduced to a collaborative system for sharing pirated binaries.