Daily Usenet Feed Size Hits 300TB

Feel like it's obligatory to say this for people unfamiliar with Usenet, but there are text groups (think text threads like a mailing list or forum) and binary groups (shows/movies/software/etc). The size growth is due to the latter.

I use both types. Text groups almost certainly fell off a cliff earlier this year when Google Groups shut off their spam posting gateway. http://www.eternal-september.org/ is a good free project for the text groups. I've been a newsdemon customer for years but they suck for text groups (their headers got messed up a few years back after a move from highwinds backbone to usenetexpress backbone).

Serious question: why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

It seems so fundamentally ill-suited to the task.

And if the answer has something to do with privacy or warnings from your ISP, it seems like VPNs would be the answer.

What am I missing?

Based on this table there's been a 1100% increase over the last 7 years, with a 60% increase between 2020 and 2021.

I'd be interested to see WHY this is the case. Is it attributable to a larger share of data that cannot be compressed vs more compressible data (e.g., Warez/Movies)?

It just seems highly unlikely this is driven by a growing user base; but, without more details other than this data table, I am at a loss for the reasons why.

rn seems to have had it right: ripped from my youth, the pre-posting warning comes to mind:

“This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.”

Gosh that's a lot of discussion!

So 300TB * 365 = ~110PB for a mirror to have 1 year of retention.

That's pretty insane lol. How many mirrors are there that can actually manage that much storage? If you're using 20TB disks that's ~5500 disks per year with zero redundancy. Double or triple that for a bare minimum... not counting the load of actually serving that data to everybody.

How is this economical for anybody at this point? Or are these Usenet mirrors all massive businesses that can support running hundreds of PBs or storage and I'm just naive?

So, binaries, warez, images, and the like?

A backchannel to download papers from sci-hub?

Or are people using Usenet as a way to send encrypted messages in a way that makes traffic analysis more difficult? (If 50,000 people download everything to a group, and post encrypted or steganographic message to that group, then it's easier than seeing that X sent an email blob to Y.)

Or, Usenet as the new numbers station?

Wow, is this all AI generated content? AI bots just discussing between each other constantly?

Is there really even that much media produced everyday? Or media that does get uploaded?

Wow. Makes me want to break out my archived installer for Microplanet Gravity, assuming it even works on Windows 10 or 11.

And a TON of it is spam and “robots talking to robots”

where's the action nowadays?