@Edent @davidgerard a few thoughts from someone who was all too there at the time: Spam expands to fill available space, and this interacted very poorly w/ usenet's lack of anything other than client-side moderation. getting value out of usenet took ever-increasing work for everyone, and everyone had their breaking point (Okay, slight lie: Usenet did have one server-side moderation mechanism: CANCEL messages. Boy oh boy did that scale extremely poorly. Hilariously poorly.)