A snippet from a relevant and interesting chapter in the book Something More Profound by nostr:nprofile1qqs2vl5cltej7ffq4et5mppxy56w0w2xyh8q6ns555xf0cmzcp4hwrspzfmhxue69uhkummnw3ezummwduh8yegpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mq3nd7sd , Chapter 6 Asleep, Tired, Or It Malingers: How Protocols Wither and Die, regarding the spam debate.
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The Usenet user experience was initially built around threads of conversations, but it didn’t take long for users to realize that a medium used to share and broadcast messages could be used to share and broadcast any sort of binary data, simply by encoding that data as if it were text. It wasn’t long after Usenet was first made available to commercial ISP users that new newsgroups under the alt.binaries. umbrella began to proliferate, with threads of dozens of messages representing pirated software and pornographic movies, encoded as text and split into multiple posts.
It was tremendously inefficient to share binary data in this way, but those inefficiencies didn’t impact the users; since the costs weren’t born by the uploaders or downloaders, but instead the newsgroup server operators — typically Internet Service Providers offering Usenet access to their users —alt.binaries traffic proliferated until the free riders had exhausted the resources made available to them. As the amount of storage required to maintain access to the alt.binaries newsgroups increased over the years, many larger ISPs decided that the Usenet juice wasn’t worth the storage squeeze, and stopped offering access to Usenet entirely. Smaller ISPs, desperate not to lose customers, found themselves racing to purchase high-end storage appliances to store all the alt.binaries data in a desperate attempt to keep the free rides going.
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