I'm a broken record on this, so you may have seen me point it out before, but NNTP started dying in the mid-late 1990s, when binaries took over. It was extraordinarily difficult to keep reliable full-feed binaries (NNTP is the dumbest conceivable way to share large binaries), and if you couldn't do that, customers would yell and ultimately abandon your service for a cheaper one, while opting for more centralized Internet NNTP services.
Ultimately I think the web would have eaten Usenet anyways, but it's a shame; we were Freenix-competitive (I think I independently invented the INN history cache), and that was some of the most fun I've had doing systems engineering work.
> I'm a broken record on this, so you may have seen me point it out before, but NNTP started dying in the mid-late 1990s,
I didn't start posting to usenet before 1999 and was a regular poster in a few groups from that time up till around 2014. Excluding spam, what was the activity level of groups before and after eternal september?
> It was extraordinarily difficult to keep reliable full-feed binaries
I don't understand why ISPs wouldn't just limit their newsfeed to the text only newsgroups? Did peering arrangments require one to also provide binary newsgroup access? IME, ISP and university news servers had mediocre binary completion rates at best. If someone wanted binaries, they could always subscribe to one of the paid newsfeeds that provided better completion. So I don't really see the incentive for providing binary access at all at an ISP/educational institution level.
That was exactly what Universities where doing here in the 90's. We didn't have physical disk space or bandwidth for a complete feed, but where able to provide all the non-binary groups in the main top levels (including alt.*).
The ISPs needed the binaries though, because that was all they were used for. People read the text on their Uni systems, where they got free dialup, rather than chew up their ISP connection time quotas.
> People read the text on their Uni systems, where they got free dialup, rather than chew up their ISP connection time quotas.
At dialup speeds, the only practical binaries one could download would be images. mp3 files were practically the upper limit of file size one could download. Beyond that, articles would expire off the server before they could be downloaded.
Without broadband and better completion rates, which commercial ISPs didn't really provide (especially the latter), customers probably wouldn't really try using their usenet feed for that purpose when they had other alternatives for binaries.
I just used my ISP's usenet access for text groups until they discontinued it.
If you disabled binaries, customers would get angrier than if you simply didn't provide Usenet at all. Nobody that cared about Usenet would sign up to a provider that didn't provide full feeds. I agree that it's irrational, but it also destroyed Usenet, a couple years earlier than I think it would have otherwise.
For what it's worth, I never called my ISP's customer support to complain about bad completion rates on Usenet. Logically, people would have found other ways to download what they wanted, either by finding an alternate source, or another usenet feed to replace or combine with their ISP's.
What really took down usenet was when Andrew Cuomo, back when he was the state attorney general of New York, made a deal with several major ISPs to restrict access to child porn via usenet.
This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their usenet service, which in turn lead decreased the number of people posting to text groups. Within a few years of that happening, practically all the regular posters in the groups I used to frequent just stopped posting. Those same groups now only have spam posted every several weeks based on what I've seen via google groups. Prior to that, these groups had plenty of active discussions going back to the mid '90s and earlier.
I was the tech lead at the most popular ISP in Chicago in the mid-late 1990s and I assure you that people complained, on Usenet, in email, and in phone calls. And we kept a full feed!
Ultimately I think the web would have eaten Usenet anyways, but it's a shame; we were Freenix-competitive (I think I independently invented the INN history cache), and that was some of the most fun I've had doing systems engineering work.