I don't think this was true. It was entirely common practice for an ISP to ignore alt.binaries but carry all the rest of Usenet fairly reliably. To the point where users would rebuke each other for posting binary content in a non alt.binaries hierarchy, lest the ISPs detect that as a stealth binary group and drop that too.
What killed Usenet was as the parent said - users are better served by the centralized management and reliability of a web forum, they don't need or care about decentralization and peering. The same thing happened for Discord and Slack replacing IRC.
Discord/Slack replaced IRC because IRC ran over a set of ports which could (and would) be blocked by almost every corporate firewall. I still remember the day that my friendly Systems Administrator left and the new guy nuked our IRC access :(
Probably the reason that took over is they are well funded and have marketing and/or salespeople. And they have emojis, file uploads, etc and they are just generally easier to use. Not that IRC is hard, but it is geeky enough.
I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC.
Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc.
And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b."
Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.
Yeah, I really don't get how people feel like IRC is somehow the pinnacle of chat. Even if you think a lot of the features added by newer applications and protocols are unnecessary or even a negative, it's really hard to argue that IRC isn't a patchwork of incredible cruft built on top of something so barebones that it just did not survive contact with reality.
Plenty of techies love idealized versions of open protocols, even horrible ones like FTP.
Similar story for ubiquitous tools. Shell is a horrible tool with a few lucky features (pipes, focus on text) that's everywhere so it wins by default. And techies turn a blind eye to its million defects.
and of course authentication, when it existed involve, literlaly involved sending your password in plaintext to some user you _hoped_ was the a system bot and not some impersonator.
> Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc.
> And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b."
These things have not really gone away on Discord. On the other hand, it's hard to choose the wrong client when there's only one you're allowed to use.
Aren't discord/slack products of the last ~5 yrs? Were IRC channels actually active until then? The last I spent time on efnet was maybe early/mid 2000s.
Discord started in 2013. Campfire from 37Signals started in 2006 or so. Web chats with immediate message availability started to spring up immediately after `document.write()` became a thing in browsers, around 1994; by 1996 I personally participated in several, all with different software stacks.
This is not to mention instant messengers like ICQ / AOL / MSN, which largely replaced private IRC chats.
What killed Usenet was as the parent said - users are better served by the centralized management and reliability of a web forum, they don't need or care about decentralization and peering. The same thing happened for Discord and Slack replacing IRC.