While this attitude is very good for USENET in general, it can be a problem in specifics. For example, there are very popular topics (games, TV shows, books/authors, current events, etc.) that might be considered of fleeting interest, but still have several people who would want to discuss it in a USENET forum.
For this reason and others, a new hierarchy was formed: the alt (alternate) hierarchy.
Adding an alt newsgroup is much easier than in any of the other major hierarchies. As a result, it is the largest of the hierarchies since it covers pretty much all of the topics covered in the other hierarchies and it allows new groups to be created easily. In a sense, the alt hierarchy is like a subset of USENET with it's own general sub-hierarchies (covering everything from alt.animals to alt.zima).
This system works out well for news administrators because they can easily choose which hierarchies to carry. They can decide not to carry any alt groups or not alt.sports or only the comp hierarchy or...
A down side is that some people create a group without thinking about how well the name fits into the system. For example, someone just scanning through the list of newsgroups might not know that alt.subspace is supposed to be for an Internet game from Virgin. Now if it had been named alt.games.subspace, that would have been clearer.
So the alt hierarchy can be a wealth of information and a chaotic jumble all at the same time.
In a sense, posting to a newsgroup is like a ripple caused by a raindrop falling into a lake. As you compose a message it is only available on your computer. Once you tell your news program to post the message, it is sent to the news server (news.azstarnet.com in this case). At that point, it can be seen by everyone who uses that news server (i.e. all the StarNet users).
At certain time intervals, the StarNet news server checks with a couple other news servers, looking for new articles from the outside world. While it's getting new articles, it sends any new posts from StarNet subscribers (like the one you wrote) to those other machines. Now your post can be seen by anyone at StarNet and those using those other news servers.
After a certain time, those news servers will check with other servers, again exchanging articles between them. Then those servers will contact other servers... and so on and so on until your post works it's way around the world (literally). Of course, this process can take a few days and sometimes without apparent reason--it is possible for a posted article appear on a news server in England or India before it does on a news server in the next town.