- eternal september, a name for the gates to usenet opening up when isps bundled access, and there no longer being a bar of being a student or academic.
- isps removing binary access
given these two things i believe to be true from my perspective on usenet at the time, why haven't usenet discussions become a more mainstream alternative to centrally managed content-and-discussion communities like Reddit?
I'd like to fight a few strawmen while I wait for someone to reply:
- People pay for premiums on conventional social networks, so i don't buy it that they wouldn't also pay to access usenet or encourage their carriers to either provide gateways or direct connections to usenet the same way carriers were encouraged to upgrade their data packages as our media consumption practices evolved.
- we are not constrained by the same bandwidth limitations as we were in the past. preventing binary access doesn't make sense in a world where torrent and bootleg youtube traffic isn't also blocked.
- the internet is already populated by the same people responsible for causing "eternal september" and they're concentrated into the communities that inspired this thread. that damage has been done and the window has shifted while the internet evolved along with the netizens inhabiting it. it's no longer a matter of displacing the academics that don't exist on usenet anymore.
Another issue is spam.