> The latest figures, per Wikipedia, puts traffic at about 74 million posts per day, totaling more than 37 terabytes.
Just yesterday, I spoke to someone who mentioned Usenet as a means of pirating movies. I cry a little inside whenever I hear that people only know of the once great decentralized discussion system as a dumb pipe.
The problem was the excessive spam and the fact that people preferred central moderation versus doing everything client-side. The groups I used to frequent have essentially been abandoned at this point (though they were active as recently as 6 or 7 years ago).
Personally, I feel a lot was lost in terms of capability of online discussion by moving it to web forums that lack actual message threading and closed source platforms. Even people who prefer email lists seem to not consider NNTP as a viable solution to online discussions.
NNTP clients didn't just have threading, but also lots of other advanced features (like kill files; client-side tagging, scoring, and filtering; advanced search, etc) that even now, 20 or 30 years later, web forums still lack.
I also dread the day when some popular web forums finally kick the bucket. It's not at all clear that the years or decades of posts on them will still be accessible. With Usenet, everyone could easily keep their own archive of all the messages or groups they were interested in, if they cared to. Trying to do the same for web forums is much more of a pain.
It may be feasible to export the comment history of HN, reddit, slashdot, and other popular forums to usenet. I don't know if that would violate some policy or TOS though.
I (hazily) recall at sgi there was a news-bug tracker gateway.
New post? New bug. Reply to post? Add a comment.
This was also how sgi exported its bugs to partners. sgi.bugs.legato was a feed that legato picked up and could then use with standard software (Netscape had a built in news reader) to be able to interact with the bug tracking system.
What I don't quite understand is that the binary groups in usenet seem to be exclusively used to distribute encrypted files, while the decryption keys are shared in invitation-only web forums and chat groups.
So, everyone who says they're using usenet for pirating stuff is in at least one of those as well? Wouldn't the fact that you have to, essentially, join "a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement in an organized manner" make the legal situation of even a passive consumer much worse compared to someone who goes to public sites?
There are still a good number of public NZB indexers out there. The vast majority put hard limits on the number of NZBs you can grab as a free user however.
But even if what you're saying were true, wouldn't the same apply to private torrent trackers? As far as I know, even when a popular private tracker is taken down, authorities only pursue operators and heavy content uploaders.
> Just yesterday, I spoke to someone who mentioned Usenet as a means of pirating movies. I cry a little inside whenever I hear that people only know of the once great decentralized discussion system as a dumb pipe.
To be fair, this was true even in the mid-90s. A lot of my college peers knew of Usenet only as a source for porn JPGs & GIFs.
I'm not sure how to calculate it accurately, but the top 1000 usenet servers page maintains statistics based on the number of articles each server listed has seen [1]. The contributors list for the previous month [2] shows the server names along with the number of articles they've processed that month (I believe).
The eternal-september news server which only serves text newsgroups processed 7,029,191 articles. usenetexpress, on the other hand, processed 1,654,703,028 articles (since it serves both text and binary newsgroups). Assuming that the text articles are a strict subset of the total number of articles, the text traffic is about 0.4% of total traffic.
On top of that, the average size of a text article may be around 3 kilobytes and the average size of a binary article is about 750 kilobytes, the percentage by size is even lower than that (about 0.0017%).
Just yesterday, I spoke to someone who mentioned Usenet as a means of pirating movies. I cry a little inside whenever I hear that people only know of the once great decentralized discussion system as a dumb pipe.