Why did Usenet fail?
I&#x27;ve used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450.<p>In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn&#x27;t a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge.<p>In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users.<p>As the article pointed out, that wasn&#x27;t the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins.<p>Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don&#x27;t see a revival coming anytime soon.