It felt like Usenet died as a meaningful place for discussion in the mid-to-late '90s, for all the same reasons that most (or all?) electronic communities eventually die. Bad posters drive away good posters and encourage even worse posters, which eventually results in something akin to YouTube. Forum entropy for lack of a better term.
By the time most ISPs started dropping it, a vanishingly small percentage of most ISPs' users even knew what it was, and the binaries groups had turned it into a source of both cost and legal risk. The heavy users were people who incurred that cost and risk to the ISPs because they were using it for pirating software and porn. The icing on the cake would've been the fact that it's a terribly inefficient way to distribute those things and the ISPs have to store all that stuff locally on servers they own.
From an ISP's perspective, maintaining Usenet feeds became all downside and no upside.
Regarding government control, I would think that Usenet would've been far easier to monitor and censor than the web.
> Bad posters drive away good posters and encourage even worse posters, which eventually results in something akin to YouTube. Forum entropy for lack of a better term.
I've heard it labeled "evaporative cooling", per [0].
A little while back I went back to some of the newsgroups that I was a regular on, back in the 2000s. It was... a bit disturbing. I recognised a lot of the names, but the people and attitudes behind them had changed a lot: insular, cliquey, a bit xenophobic, a bit crazy.
I've seen the same attitude before in tiny SIGs: go take a look the what's left of the classic 16-bit micro (or early 32-bit micro) userbases and you'll see a lot of it. But it was very sad to see happen to people I knew and used to interact with on a daily basis.
I noticed that too, my hypothesis is one must be a little off to stay in those small, shrinking echo chamber communities for decades. In the instance I'm thinking of, some of the members did indeed have mental health issues.
By the time most ISPs started dropping it, a vanishingly small percentage of most ISPs' users even knew what it was, and the binaries groups had turned it into a source of both cost and legal risk. The heavy users were people who incurred that cost and risk to the ISPs because they were using it for pirating software and porn. The icing on the cake would've been the fact that it's a terribly inefficient way to distribute those things and the ISPs have to store all that stuff locally on servers they own.
From an ISP's perspective, maintaining Usenet feeds became all downside and no upside.
Regarding government control, I would think that Usenet would've been far easier to monitor and censor than the web.