Have not been on usenet since late 2005-ish, I think, ever since misc.fitness.weights went to hell. I was basically just reading alt.humor.best-of-internet and rec.arts.sf.science at that point.
Used to. Lately it turns up a lot in my google searches. Not Usenet, but I actively mirror mailing lists via the NTP gateway of GMANE. This excellent for learning Open Source software packages; I mirror the entire discussion archive with Thunderbird and I can search it when I am not online. I think I have "groked" the guts of major software projects fairly quickly this way.
And better than most things you find on forums. I just plain forget that it's there. Some of the better ones seem to have been vacated by these greybeards or taken over by spam.
It used to be that dejanews was my first stop for just about any issue that I ran in to. Then the spammers came and flooded it, dejanews did their best but was slowly losing the battle. Then google took over and spoiled it completely.
Haven't used it for text in many years though. I still resent Google a bit for buying Deja News and letting it die on the vine. Google could have transformed usenet into the web era. Dealing with all these random web forums lacking basic features that good news readers had 15 years ago is just a clumsy way of dealing with discussions. When possible I use RSS feeds of forums to bridge the gap. Unfortunately it's still not all that well supported or commonly disabled on many forums.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 35.7 ms ] threadHaven't been there in years.
Haven't used it for text in many years though. I still resent Google a bit for buying Deja News and letting it die on the vine. Google could have transformed usenet into the web era. Dealing with all these random web forums lacking basic features that good news readers had 15 years ago is just a clumsy way of dealing with discussions. When possible I use RSS feeds of forums to bridge the gap. Unfortunately it's still not all that well supported or commonly disabled on many forums.