> So porn figures importantly in the demise of usenet. Here I disagree
> with Dmytri's implication that usenet died because of its
> decentralised nature. As I remember it, being a sysadmin and network
> engineer, it was more a simple question of expense of running a full
> feed. alt.binaries was big. The news server took a lot of disk space
> and consumed a lot of bandwidth and accounted for a small portion of
> revenue. The decisions at ISPs to stop running news servers were
> taken
> pretty much on those terms and had little to do with thinking about
> centralisation or lack thereof.


I never said "usenet died because of it's decentralized nature."

I said "Once capital became the dominant source of financing it
directed investment toward centralized platforms, which are better at
providing such surveillance and control, the original platforms were
starved of financing. The centralized platforms grew and the
decentralized platforms submerged beneath the rising tides of the
capitalist web."

Whatever problems Usenet or other platforms may have had, these issues
could have been fixed with investment in the further development of the
platform, or perhaps a whole new distributed platform, such investment
was never made, while billions where invested in centralized platforms.

And in any case, porn is actually what has kept usenet alive. Though
not as free service. Commercial UseNet services carries more traffic
today than at any point in it's history. Wares, Porn, etc. And many of
the newsgroups are still active, alt.slack, sci.econ, etc. largely
thanks to google groups. Usenet will never die, it has simply, as
explained above, "submerged beneath the rising tides of the capitalist
web" and is frozen in time stuck at a stage of development that can
never be suitable as a platform for the masses.

Best,


--
Dmytri Kleiner

http://www.trick.ca


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