For what it's worth, I never called my ISP's customer support to complain about bad completion rates on Usenet. Logically, people would have found other ways to download what they wanted, either by finding an alternate source, or another usenet feed to replace or combine with their ISP's.
What really took down usenet was when Andrew Cuomo, back when he was the state attorney general of New York, made a deal with several major ISPs to restrict access to child porn via usenet.
This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their usenet service, which in turn lead decreased the number of people posting to text groups. Within a few years of that happening, practically all the regular posters in the groups I used to frequent just stopped posting. Those same groups now only have spam posted every several weeks based on what I've seen via google groups. Prior to that, these groups had plenty of active discussions going back to the mid '90s and earlier.
I was the tech lead at the most popular ISP in Chicago in the mid-late 1990s and I assure you that people complained, on Usenet, in email, and in phone calls. And we kept a full feed!
What really took down usenet was when Andrew Cuomo, back when he was the state attorney general of New York, made a deal with several major ISPs to restrict access to child porn via usenet.
This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their usenet service, which in turn lead decreased the number of people posting to text groups. Within a few years of that happening, practically all the regular posters in the groups I used to frequent just stopped posting. Those same groups now only have spam posted every several weeks based on what I've seen via google groups. Prior to that, these groups had plenty of active discussions going back to the mid '90s and earlier.