On Thu, 25 Jun 2015 05:55:59 -0400, Paul Murphy
<CornedBeef@Cabbage.com> wrote:
>Imporrtant movements rise and fall in cycles. I first found the Usenet
>in the late 1980s, on an Amiga 500. At it's height, I was a member of
>about 120 groups. Then 2 things happened. The WWW came along, and bled
>off users. Young people weren't finding out about the Usenet. Secondly,
>Groups began to be attacked by spammers. In a colossal blunder of
>failure to understand their own self-interest, Giganews and other
>providers refused to do anyathing about it. Group after group got
>choked by spam to the extent that it was hard to find real posts. Users
>disappeared, and groups closed down. In a few cases, groups that once
>had many contributors were sustained by a superstar:Captain Salvo in
>music; Rockhound 57 in e-books, cronic and a few others in audiobooks.
>Today, only the audiobook people remain, snd they aren't worth $30 a
>month. So long, Usenet. I knew ye well.
>
>Paul
What you missed was that around 2008 Andrew Cuomo as the NYS Attorney
General sued Time Warner/Roadrunner over rampant kiddie porn on Usenet
and settled with them dropping free news service. The other big
providers followed along. That seemed to be the tip over the slippery
slope. One of the big questions was always whether or not TW defended
the case or paid the AG to sue them so they had an excuse to get rid
of something they considered a wide band usage nuisance.
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