It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love, but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a place.
> It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love, but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a place.
Usenet had graphics and emojis. What it didn't have was the ability for a nascent community to easily set up their own server or newsgroups, not in the same way a nontechnical person could easily get webhosting for their forums. And moderation of Usenet was possible, though again a higher barrier than competing services. What killed off Usenet was the general shift of the Internet towards technologies that can be easily accessed over HTTP, with the primary HTTP access to Usenet (Google Groups) being a barely usable piece of shit.
Also, the Usenet model was that your ISP ran a server that pulled from the global feed. But most ISPs shut down their servers in the early 2000s and forced people to look elsewhere. Sure they could have gone to a public server, but the person would have to find that before they found other options and most did not. They ended up on Myspace, Slashdot, Digg, 4chan, etc...
That's not my memory. My memory is that Google basically bought it (by buying Deja News) and turned it into Google Groups, removing most of what made it great. That was when people really left in droves.
But that was a long time ago. I could be misremembering.
Usenet was/is decentralized. Yes, some things that are technically decentralized still end up centralized. But that's not what was going on or why Google bought Deja News, I don't think. They, at that time, ostensibly, wanted the historical usenet archive, and to make it searchable. Most people using usenet at the time didn't actually have access to a complete archive, just however much their usenet provider had chosen to keep on-hand from whenever that provider started distributing usenet.
I don't think the majority of usenet users were using it via Deja News provider. They could all keep accessing it however they were used to, Google's acquisition didn't change that, Gogle had no way to "remove what made usenet great" (i'm not sure what you are thinking of here being removed) -- if people switched from usenet to google groups (and I'm sure some did), it was because google groups had something they wanted that usenet didn't, google had absolutely no way to force anyone to do that, usenet kept existing the same as it ever did -- on a long-term trend of increasing irrelevancy.
Right, that's why I said "essentially". My memory is hazy, of course, but I remember that a whole lot of people stopped using usenet after that purchase. Some because they felt sold out to Google, and some because they saw it as a sign that Usenet was going to get absorbed into the borg. A system being decentralized does not make it immune from being that sort of thing. Look at what gmail did to email.
Whether or not that was most people, I don't know. But it was more than a few.
I mean, it was all around the same time. But I would argue it was a correlative effect, not causative. People were already moving on to web based message boards, more and more people were viewing Usenet as a place for warez & not discussion boards, etc. I'm sure there were people for whom that was the final straw, but I can't imagine that being the true nail in the coffin.
Personally I stuck with Usenet until the early 2010's. But it was so low signal that in retrospect I'm not sure why I bothered.
It was quickly abandoned because the signal to noise ratio went from 1:1.5 to 1:5000 overnight. Nobody gave two craps about emojis (which did largely not exist at the time) or graphics.
Nobody wanted to pay for bandwidth used by the gigabyte in an unlimited fashion by thankless anonymous folks back around 20+ years ago. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to pay for it to be similarly used by the terabyte today.
That's a bold assessment.
It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love, but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a place.