Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.
In Germany basically all ISPs never provided the binary groups, so piracy was never an issue. There also was no conspiracy to shut down the servers because of that.
I was active in the German Usenet back then and still remember that between around 2001 and 2005 the spammers and trolls took over and destoyed one group after another until they were completely unusable. I also mostly quit around maybe 2005.
So I highly doubt that Usenet would have continued to work if ISPs had just continued support it. Usenet only worked as long as everyboy was nice to each other, it would never work today without much better moderation protocols and tools.
It was expensive. I ran an ISP on the mid 90s, and it took up an expensive server and a disproportionate amount of my time to ensure we had good enough feeds for people to be happy, and so the moment demand was dropping it was very high on the list of things to get rid of.
Had peering been more on demand, rather than a firehouse, maybe people would have kept them longer.
I for a while worked on an aggressively caching NNTP server as an option because of the costs involved.
Yeah, people forget just how expensive both bandwidth and storage were in the late 1990s.
YouTube appeared in 2005 and was losing VAST amounts of money before Google bought them out. So, even in 2005, Usenet probably was still too expensive.
Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts.
Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably never even knew it existed.
ISPs became client-less after broadband became widespread. ISPs didn't want to write or provide software, they just wanted to provide data over basic cable/DSL. Even AOL instant messenger eventually faded, as it never really adapted itself to a non desktop centric web.
Gnus was a joy to use. Never has an application fitted me better.
Spam was the issue – there were extensions and initiatives to combat it, but it was a losing battle. It was a major cultural loss – Reddit can at its best approach it, but not replace what existed in the early nineties.
Usenet faded because it wasn't monetizable, outside of subscription based binary providers (who were in large part turning around and pumping that money into the legal defense funds, because they were primarily servicing the swashbuckling community).
The platforms that are actively used are codependent. They demand you use them. They send you emails when you haven't logged in in awhile. They foment opposition just to keep you engaged, so you'll view their ads.
Usenet, on the other hand, lets you use it, if you feel like it, assuming you know where to look.
The only sort of people who would use Usenet would be those that make decisions for themselves, rather than doing what the marketers tell them. It never stood a chance against this sort of opposition.
I've never had an experience as smooth and easy as usenet on Free Agent as the gui client. Everything else, forums, socials, etc, contain a subset of the features in that setup.
Usenet doesn't have a UX by itself, it's a protocol. The user experience is entirely dictated by the software used to access it. And Outlook supported Usenet all the way from the word go. Macs didn't even come with any email clients back in those times, but popular ones supported Usenet and there were also Usenet-exclusive programs available.
I think it was Outlook Express rather than Outlook that supported NNTP. The early version of OE was even called "Internet Mail and News" or something like that.
I've been using Outlook since 1997 and this is the first time I heard that Outlook supported Usenet. This is what I mean, even if it was theoretically supported, it wasn't discoverable. If you knew what to connect to and how to wire up Outlook, sure, you could get it going.
But let's take something else from the same era and provide a comparison for the average user: yahoo.com. You typed it into the browser, and you were instantly presented with several hundred interesting links. No config necessary, just click and go. The UX needed to be that simple.
Actually discovering good channels on Usenet took time and investment. As opposed to Reddit, for example, which used upvotes and decay based algorithms (also, see HN) to make fresh subreddits discoverable on the main feed.
Outlook express supported Usenet, but Outlook did not.
That’s why I had to retire my company’s internal NNTP setup - because at some point, too many users were just using it through the web and email gateway that it was cumbersome and made no senses to keep it running.
Today, we could all run our own NNTP servers. The traffic on most newsgroups (excluding binaries) would be a trickle compared to the average broadband connection.
I ran my own news server in the 90's, receiving about a dozen groups over dialup with a UUCP feed.
I assume they dropped it because they couldn't monetize it, i.e. spam you with personalized ads and the like. Probably the same reason why RSS News feeds were dropped.
