What's The Problem With USENET?

Sir_Winston writes: "For many months now, several of the larger news servers--at least, the "premium" news servers who sell access to individuals, not just to other businesses--have been experiencing severe problems with retention and sometimes with propagation as well. I can remember subscribing to services like Altopia and Newsfeeds because my local ISP's feed had retention of only ~2 days, but now several of the commercial news servers are down from 8-14 days to around 2-4 days. (some offer retention stats on their Web pages, and others can be gleaned from talking with customers). Talking with users, some seem to blame broadband connections for allowing users to flood USENET beyond reasonable capacities. Is this the case, or are there other considerations? Given that USENET isn't a truly distributed system, is it in for increasing problems as more people keep dumping massive binaries that may be better posted somewhere else? (For example, almost every mp3 posted to USENET can be found on Napster, often at higher bitrate). So, is there a problem, and if so how can it be addressed, and which USENET providers are still doing well at retention and completeness?"

Comments

binaries on usenet.

[chuqui]

Usenet is the worst possible way to distribute binaries -- you are sending every byte of every messages to every computer everywhere, in case someone someone might want to look at it. It's the worse possible distribution model you could think of, especially since you have to encode it in 7bit ascii to boot, thus exploding filesize even further.

Want to fix usenet? do away with binaries. How? damfino. I wish you luck. As someone else said, with things like Napster, there's no reason for usenet binaries any more, anyway. Except for the "I have a hammer, so this must be a nail" problem. It's there, it's used, and nobody can say "no".

The primary use for usenet these days, IMHO, is to be a place where the kiddies go so they don't annoy the people with a clue who left and moved onto real systems to get their stuff done....