Whatever your feelings are about copyright infringement, the fact is that it killed Usenet, by making it intractable for independents to run full-feed Usenet servers (it was simply too expensive, and the work to keep up with the binaries drastically reduced the quality of service for the text posts). The result was a system that really only served copyright infringement, because those were the users anyone seriously investing in Usenet infrastructure were serving.
If people wanted to use Usenet for text then a service that didn’t offer binary groups should not have been a problem for people, right?
It seems rather that the value of the text groups was not high enough to get people to pay ~ anything as we scaled the internet and other text forums became widely available.
Text is ~ free. People typing at 180wpm only generate ~120bps of uncompressed text. A song is 2000x that, a video 10-100k x that. It seems like a model w paid barriers to entry to text forums is just not viable compared to free-to-the-user forums, or at least weren’t competitive when that ad-based model began.
I think it would be good for an open standard for text existed and was widely used, and didn’t rely on ads. But I don’t really see how logically one can blame the binaries for killing the text side of usenet. If people wanted to pay for text, they would have kept doing it. But as we’ve seen over the last 20 years, that business model has not generally worked.
It was a problem for everybody. You don't have to wonder about it: Usenet did consolidate down to a couple providers. People really did organize against providers that didn't carry binary feeds.
