Some time ago I created a chat that uses the same principles, it's funny to have some ideas validated by something that has been around for over 20 years and that I didn't know existed.
/oldfart
Myspace proved social networking worked. Facebook made it easy for non-techies and kicked off the status game. Instagram locked in the dopamine loop. TikTok perfected it.
The internet grew because it got commercialized, which also meant dumbing it down for non-technical people. Funny how that same growth created most of the wealth enjoyed by people posting on YC. Always makes me chuckle when I see good old days of the internet nostalgia here.
That's all I was trying to say. trn was a bit of a learning curve for moms and grandmas. And they pulled the rest of us along into using Facebook and other social media and leaving USENET behind. No gatekeeping or whatever you're going on about here.
This is true of a lot of tech dating back to the mainframe days.
Indecently, the decline in the popularity of USENET makes it much less useful for anonymous messages; it's much easier to conduct traffic analysis amongst relatively few users/nodes [1] than it was back in the mid-to-late 1990's when USENET was at its peak and every ISP provided a feed. These days you will stand out if you have (or request) a USENET feed. Back then, it was the norm to have one.
[1] Yes, traffic volumes have increased (primarily due to sharing binaries rather than text), but the number of active users/nodes has certainly declined.
Those flying the Jolly Rodger. Filter out the binary newsgroups (leaving only the text discussion groups) and the resulting load is a tiny fraction of that.
See also https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/docs-2.7/newsfeeds...