Bad service drives out good service just like bad money, for some reason. Centralized beats decentralized because convenience. The convenience is what they're paying to entice you to come into their home and let them eat your brains, and every single person falls for it, probably including you and me.
Classic Usenet is still around. If you have an email address, you can get an account on Eternal September. There aren't that many users. You can be one of them.
True enough but we know what scientology believes because of USENET (alt.religion.scientology). The church of scientology literally ran out of lawyers for DMCA takedowns, which don't work on USENET because it is structured like the internet.
NNTP needed things to be sure but the above issues have technical solutions that seemed out of reach not because they were too complex to solve, but is seemed as if society itself wanted multimedia web pages like a coke addict.
Also things like digital identity seemed to flag as innovation for such things stalled out around the time HTTP became rising. I remember moving data between mainframes from different vendors and what was once a set of problems that seemed intractable suddenly fell as TCP/UDP/IP took off with a suite of solutions that worked so well together.
USENet was a better place to get good information compared to web pages at that time in parts due to bad web site designs and DMCA takedowns, neither of which was an issue for NNTP. I like Reddit because (at least old.reddit) is similar to USENet in how it is structured.
Had NNTP adopted HTML and Netscape written a browser for news groups using HTML, the so-called 'world wide web' and it's anachronistic client-server model might not have effectively displaced NNTP.
Bad service drives out good service just like bad money, for some reason. Centralized beats decentralized because convenience. The convenience is what they're paying to entice you to come into their home and let them eat your brains, and every single person falls for it, probably including you and me.
Classic Usenet is still around. If you have an email address, you can get an account on Eternal September. There aren't that many users. You can be one of them.