The unregulated nature of Usenet and spam/malware arguably killed it, not a NY politician. ISPs generally didn't carry a lot of newsgroups anyway, and the best service was always from dedicated Usenet providers.
Sadly these days it's only useful for binary downloads if you also use an NZB indexer. Does anyone still use it for discussion?
> The unregulated nature of Usenet and spam/malware arguably killed it, not a NY politician.
But it did lead to a lot of major ISPs dropping their usenet service around the same time. That killed a lot of existing newsgroups because most, if not all, the regular posters stopped participating. That's what happened to the newsgroups I used to frequent by the late 2000s.
> ISPs generally didn't carry a lot of newsgroups anyway, and the best service was always from dedicated Usenet providers
On the 3 or so ISPs I used when posting to usenet, they pretty much carried the vast majority of groups under the big 8 hierarchy. But what you say was definitely true for binary groups, where retention and completion were far more important metrics in terms of level of service and usability.
> Does anyone still use [usenet] for discussion?
I've heard that several of the groups under the comp hierarchy are still relatively active.
Sadly these days it's only useful for binary downloads if you also use an NZB indexer. Does anyone still use it for discussion?