It's called NNTP and predates HTTP.

dagw · on July 3, 2015

And it was glorious. And then it died.

pjc50 · on July 3, 2015

.. partly due to lack of effective moderation tools.

kefka · on July 3, 2015

No. It was thanks to the ISPs dumping NNTP servers.

Back in the dialup days, they had NNTP servers available, pulling nearly all the NGs. As time went by, alt.binaries took over 99% of the bandwidth, along with a nice cornucopia of pirated content. It was rather awesome.

When DSL/Cable took over, those companies axed their news servers, if they had any at all. And your server choice was to use a non-binaries carrying, post limited free server or paid server.

That's how it was killed.