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> Usenet was at one point a huge portion of internet traffic.

Usenet posts were just text that may have been several kilobytes in size at most. If you look at binary newsgroups, the current level of internet traffic is quite large[1] (though that was 12 years ago and is by now multiple petabytes per day).

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/26/usenet-traffic-growth-to-a...



The size of the daily Usenet feed is up to over 200TB a day now, even more than the 9TB number in your link. Although I imagine the total daily amount transferred by users is going to dwarf the size of the feed, one might still note for reference that total daily internet traffic is about 3EB which is around 15,000x that of a single full news service.

In other words, good point! I hadn't realized that in nominal terms, Usenet was still growing like topsy (albeit likely shrinking as a total proportion of global traffic).

[0] https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size

[1] https://techjury.net/blog/how-much-data-is-created-every-day...




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