Usenet is the main reason I started my own ISP in ’93: to have a reliable USENET feed. I loved it then, and I love it now.

Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

Similar! And for a while my back bedroom in London was one of the world's top USENET 'transit' nodes, getting as high as ~#6 IIRC!