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Comment by StableAlkyne | Hacker News Reader

My conspiracy theory is that they bought it to kill Usenet. Search is their business, and users going to Usenet (which you can't exactly search without an archive) instead of a forum on the web hurts business.

So they bought DejaNews and slapped a deliberately bad UI onto it. And as every ISP dropped Usenet, people were told "Go to Google Groups to keep talking."

And because the UX was outright worse than the newsreaders they had been using (no killfiles, no moderation for spam, etc), people left for forums.

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The ISPs all dropped USENET when NY AG Coumo strong armed several ISPs to drop Usenet Binaries for the made up reason of Child Porn. The tell was he wanted them to drop all binaries not just the 'adult' ones. He was running for Governor, which is why I felt it was a publicity stunt and a favor to big media, who didn't want to litigate about Usenet due to the complexity and the existing case law.

The worst part about the whole thing is they could have just dropped the binary groups and kept the text groups. By dropping all of Usenet, they killed most of the discussion and effectively handed it to the binaries users. In doing so, they created an environment where most people using Usenet were doing it to pirate stuff, and those users had already moved to private providers who could afford the bandwidth.

Nowadays all you get when you search for Usenet providers are folks dedicated to binaries. Piracy won and smothered out discussion in the process. Even the Usenet sub on Reddit is just discussions that toe the line on Reddit's piracy rules.

The only text-only provider I'm still aware of is Eternal-September. I've heard of SDF offering newsgroups as well but I haven't looked into it.

There are lots of small text-only providers, but they're not widely known because they're small. ES is special because they allow low-friction signups; others you will mostly need to know the admin to get an account.

That 'everyone online is a predator' act has been going on for a while hasn't it?

Its current snake head is the UK's online safety bill.

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