usenet

name

Etymology: From USENIX, a group of computer programmers using the operating system Unix, from users of Unix. See net (“network”).

1. A world-wide distributed discussion system consisting of newsgroups that are classified hierarchically by subject.

   “And as the Carnegie Mellon study is careful to point out, pornographic image files, despite their evident popularity, represent only about 3% of all the messages on the Usenet newsgroups, while the Usenet itself represents only 11.5% of the traffic on the Internet.”