Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not how it happened. The old academic usenet was more than content to discuss sensitive topics. The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
Small groups were ok. As soon as a group had any reasonable traffic, the spammers moved it. Since the spammers didn't care about conversation, they didn't need to maintain stable identify and evaded killfiles. They could quickly drowning out the topic with 10x ads. Not wanting this is not about being uncomfortable - it was about swimming in 90% garbage ads.
> Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not how it happened. The old academic usenet was more than content to discuss sensitive topics.
I see no insult towards you, or anyone else in particular. In fact, to the opposite, others here are saying Usenet died due to lack of content moderation - aka other people enforcing their will on others.
> The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
Now I know you're just guessing. The 'September that never ended' was when AoL peered with internet gateways to bring everyone on the AoL network to the internet, along with knowing little about computers or anything. "Me too" was around then, as a derogatory comment of what an AOLer would say. Even Weird Al in "All about the Pentiums" had a line to put them down like Old Yeller.
Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why, but grumbles that made it out in the systems engineering folk were that it was alt.binaries were eating up loads of bandwidth, and much of it was 100% piracy.
Spam was a thing, but most of us used good NNCP clients that removed a good 90+% of spam. And having lived through when Usenet was ubiquitous, I fully reject your hypothesis.
And you might want to consider taking conversations here more impersonally. Feeling "insulted" over a comment that was directed to nobody in particular isn't healthy.
> Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why
It was because the attorney general of New York (Andrew Cuomo) made a deal with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography[1]. ISPs decided to drop their usenet service in response.
Towards the late 2000s, alt.binaries was irrelevant to consumer ISPs etc, as it was not available. It was trivial for any systems engineer to exclude alt.binaries.* from their news server, and most did.
Usenet went from students posting at a modest number of elite schools, .mil sites, and a relative handful of tech companies--often under their real name--to the Eternal September and beyond. Like many problems with the Internet over the years which occurred because systems that grew up on the assumption of mostly trustworthy actors.
Small groups were ok. As soon as a group had any reasonable traffic, the spammers moved it. Since the spammers didn't care about conversation, they didn't need to maintain stable identify and evaded killfiles. They could quickly drowning out the topic with 10x ads. Not wanting this is not about being uncomfortable - it was about swimming in 90% garbage ads.