Usenet: still useful for things besides porn, piracy, and bickering with programmers?

jcc

Is Usenet a lost cause? Most discussion seems to happen on message boards like this one nowadays.

My experience with usenet has been dead groups drowning in spam, extremely active binary groups with obscure and illegal porn and software, and a few clean groups that have high concentrations of aging computer people.

Is there more to it than that?

Apreche

No.

Kilarney

I've been lamenting the death of usenet. I remember the days when Dejanews had the answer to pretty much any question. The nice thing about usenet was that everything was contained in one place. A simple search at Dejanews brought you any information you needed.

Now forums are all over the place, and many forums compete with each other. The forum traffic is fragmented. Sometimes that is a good thing (you can find a board that suits you best), but often it is a bad thing.

I wish there was a central registry for forums at Google - and a good way to search JUST forums through Google. Google bought Dejanews, but that acquisition is dying a painful death.

Dkong

Usenet's not even useful for porn. There are tons of sites, and usenet is kinda a pain in the ass.

Paulathon

I used to use Dejanews religiously. I still use Google Groups when regular Google isn't working, like when I'm searching for words that could apply to any number of topics. If I restrict my searches to a particular newsgroup I'm guaranteed to get no extraneous hits. Also, by sorting the results by age, I can avoid old material. There's no easy way to do that with Google in this age of dynamically generated content. Finally, sometimes you just want to read a bunch of posts, and many forums are slow; preloading the last month of a newsgroup takes very little time and you can get through them quickly. You need a newsreader like Thunderbird for that, though, and since I switched to Gmail I haven't bothered reinstalling it.