Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> wrote:

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987679

Quote—

Old usenet-head here (on it regularly from 1991, first met it 1986) ...

First problem: there's no identity authentication mechanism in NNTP. So spam is a problem, forged moderation headers are a problem, general abuse is a problem. (A modern syndicated forum system with OAuth or some successor model would be a lot easier

to ride herd on.)

Second problem: storage demands expand faster than the user base. Because it's a flood-fill store-and-forward system, each server node tries to replicate the entire feed. Consequently news admins tended to put a short expiry on posts in binary groups

so they'd be deleted fairly promptly ... but if you do that, the lusers can't find what they're looking for so they ask their friends to repost the bloody things, ad nauseam.

Third problem: etiquette. Yeah, yeah, I am coming over all elitist here, but the original usenet mindset was exactly that. These days we're used to being overrun by everyone who can use a point-and-drool interface on their phone to look at Facebook,

but back in September 1992 it was a real shock to the system when usenet was suddenly gatewayed onto AOL, I can tell you. Previously usenet more or less got along because the users were university staff and students (who could be held accountable to some
extent) and computer industry folks. Thereafter, well, a lot of the worse aspects of 4chan and Reddit were pioneered on usenet. (Want to know why folks hero-worshipped Larry Wall before he wrote Perl? Because he wrote this thing called rn(1). Which had
killfiles.) Anyway, a side-effect of this was that when web browsers began to show up, the response was to double-down on the high-powered CURSES-based or pure command-line clients rather than to try and figure out how to put an easy-to-use interface on
top of a news spool. Upshot: usenet clients remained rooted in the early 1990s at best.

These days much of the functionality of usenet (minus the binaries) is provided by Reddit. Usenet itself turned into a half-assed space-hogging brain dead file sharing network. And we know what ISPs think of space-hogging half-assed stuff that doesn't

make them money and risks getting them sued.

—End Quote

As said by the off topic, spamming ass hole who IS the problem.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)