As home internet moved from a competitive dialup market to a handful of DSL/Cable players, all ancillary services dropped in importance. People weren't willing to take 128kbps ISDN instead of 10Mbps cable because they had better Usenet coverage or retention policies, or more personal home page storage, or better email services.
These services, in turn, became obvious places to economize and scale back. Nobody uses them because we don't invest in them so we shouldn't invest in them. All everyone wants is port 80 and promising the largest number of "up to" MBps we can.
So eventually ISP-infrastructure Usenet falls apart, and you're left with having to find an external service provider, which usually was competing for an entirely different market-- "we have the mostest and bestest alt.binaries, and we're going to charge prices close to what we pay for a streaming service in 2023, because that's an expensive customer to service" rather than "we have all the text-based communities you love, and realistically, each user clicking three banner ads a month would finance the bandwidth and disc space those use."
I loved Usenet as a teen, but the family stayed on a crappy provider for too long, and they killed it. I got an account on a server being offered as a public service a few years later, only to find it shuttered within weeks of doing so.
I just want to go back to 1997, writing terrible cringe RP on alt.fan.dragons.
As home internet moved from a competitive dialup market to a handful of DSL/Cable players, all ancillary services dropped in importance. People weren't willing to take 128kbps ISDN instead of 10Mbps cable because they had better Usenet coverage or retention policies, or more personal home page storage, or better email services.
These services, in turn, became obvious places to economize and scale back. Nobody uses them because we don't invest in them so we shouldn't invest in them. All everyone wants is port 80 and promising the largest number of "up to" MBps we can.
So eventually ISP-infrastructure Usenet falls apart, and you're left with having to find an external service provider, which usually was competing for an entirely different market-- "we have the mostest and bestest alt.binaries, and we're going to charge prices close to what we pay for a streaming service in 2023, because that's an expensive customer to service" rather than "we have all the text-based communities you love, and realistically, each user clicking three banner ads a month would finance the bandwidth and disc space those use."
I loved Usenet as a teen, but the family stayed on a crappy provider for too long, and they killed it. I got an account on a server being offered as a public service a few years later, only to find it shuttered within weeks of doing so.
I just want to go back to 1997, writing terrible cringe RP on alt.fan.dragons.