Falter on binaries coverage even a little and customers would revolt.
Doesn't this suggest it had less to do with binaries than the kind of users it had and could retain/attract? My impression at the time was that it was too clunky for new users (convoluted setup, specialized text or native clients, obtuse topic hierarchy, etc) and binaries or not, the web killed it just like it killed ftp sites, standalone email clients and so on. Why weren't companies running servers just for discussions (or maybe there were? what happened to them?)
Binaries made Usenet massively --- orders of magnitude --- more expensive to run. Fewer service providers ran their own Usenet service. Fewer people got access to Usenet. A death spiral commenced.
Doesn't this suggest it had less to do with binaries than the kind of users it had and could retain/attract? My impression at the time was that it was too clunky for new users (convoluted setup, specialized text or native clients, obtuse topic hierarchy, etc) and binaries or not, the web killed it just like it killed ftp sites, standalone email clients and so on. Why weren't companies running servers just for discussions (or maybe there were? what happened to them?)