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Usenet died partly due to the ads, and the inability for adblocking software at the time to keep up.

People left and never came back.

But those bots were certainly around in the 90s

Worst is... the bots, spam and ads are still there, even if there is no-one to read them. Usenet might still be alive (for piracy/binaries at least), and maybe a handfull of still-alive text-groups, but in the text-groups I used to read, it's nothing but a constant flow of spam since 15+ years.

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