The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 05/04/13 11:12, John Williamson wrote:
How much of the 50% reduction in message numbers and bytes used on the
greenend.org graph is due to people not using the binary groups to share
files with the rise of facebook and other sharing services such as
soundcloud and Flickr?

I don't know Richard's source for his graph for sure, but I'm fairly
confident it's text-only.

You have obviously never run a news server.

Its MASSiVELY STUPENDOUSLY expensive to provide storage,.. Even for
text only.

Or it was back in the day. Multiple copies of every single message ever
written, or even the last 6 weeks or so, mean storage is replicated for
the entire usenet traffic right across the internet, and back in the day
of modems and UUCP, beyond as well.

Maybe it was back in the day. But now I think you could run a primary
text-only node off your home broadband connection without bothering the
'fair use' policy. Internet bandwidth and storage capacity has shot up and
Usenet traffic has shot down. If the stats are 30MB/day of the main
hierarchies, storage is the least of your worries.

Even that wasn't great. Again back in the day running a full text only
server was chewing 30% of total bandwidth he had. Today of course with
streaming videos its barely noticeable.

Today, of course, binaries on Usenet will completely overwhelm any
infrastructure that is foolish enough to take them...

Theo