Laughs in Usenet. The proliferation of streaming services and restricted content has me investing in alternative options more these days. It's not about paying for content, it's about content becoming less accessible again.
The rise in pirate binary groups is what killed Usenet feeds on most ISPs.
I used to be a great follower of text groups but it became more and more difficult to find a feed and the overall signal:noise ratio faded.
Eventually I gave up. Thanks for nothing, you folks who want to watch other people's content for free.
There were basically a few stages:
1. The Eternal September, and it was dark and cold.
2. The rise of the spam bots, and it became filthy.
3. The weight of the binaries, and ISPs began to shy away.
4. The popularity of PHPBB, and The Eternal September began to wane.
5. The binaries grew heavier, the spam more pervasive, and more and more human peers found their access dropped by their ISPs.
NNTP was glorious while it lasted, but it died by its popularity.
My ISP actually prohibits P2P transfers, so whatever you're downloading, if you want to use torrents, it's the only way to go without getting nasty emails.
If they say that P2P transfers on their network cause congestion and degradation, I believe them, and I'm happy to find alternatives.
On certain things you now have download as it becomes available, in a week it’ll be gone. For things that no one cares to pay for monitoring of, you can go back years.
So, pros and cons to torrents that don’t get taken down specially but torrents “die” of old age when no one seeds them.
It’s odd to me that file sharing seems to have hit a wall after torrents got popular. Doesn’t it seem like Usenet shouldn’t be the best option considering it’s age?
- Usenet is likely the "best" option because it's super niche due to it's age. Only a certain subset of people even know it exists, much less use it, and the effort to track down anything except the most popular stuff is just too expensive.
- I think file sharing in general started to die off because streaming services actually provided a good alternative for a while. Right now, they are basically online cable companies though, and I feel like a new re-surgance of file sharing is likely coming as a backlash. As the prices go up, the fragmentation explodes and items come and go as contracts, consolidation and new launches affect availability, people will be frustrated and look for alternatives, legal or not.
All that said, I love (or loved) Usenet for communicating on Newsgroups. I’m glad that they still are around. I hope Newsgroups and IRC never die.
'Best' is subjective, often the network effect wins and people will keep using something that is 'good enough'.
Usenet archives go back 10 years. How are you going to start a Usenet competitor with 10 years worth of content?
You see this ALL the time and it is the primary driver for people using the work "modern" to excess.