Thread: Is Usenet Worth It?

How many of you guys use Usenet? Do you feel it is worth the money with the advent of discussion forums, not to mention IRC?

Since there are a few free (eternal-september.org) or cheap places to get usenet text groups, yep, it is definitely worth it.

One plus, that is also a minus, is that most of usenet is not moderated. Subjects discussed can and do get way off-topic, crude and other negative things. But you can also have a lot of very good questions and answers that might not show up in the various other forums outside usenet.

But usenet is gradually dieing off. Most ISPs used to have a news server they worked with or had their own in the past, now most have dropped it. The sad part is that all too often, when they dropped usenet, no one noticed.

Thanks for the info. I didn't know eternal-september.org exited. Cox (my ISP) dropped Usenet a few years ago.

Yep. I thought I'd miss it when I went with Fios, which does not support news groups. Turned out, it did not matter to me at all. I can't even remember the ones I frequented. I do remember stopping alt.echostar years ago due to flaming and hateful posts.

Yes, usenet is wild and wooly, which can be fun. I participate in a few newsgroups, a couple of them .advocacy groups that are definitely wild and wooly!

Other than that, you can get all kinds of crap on your computer from them in the binary groups. Pirated software, books, videos, etc; of course, you can also get a really hairy virus there too!!

I remember the days when usenet was king -- and learned a hell of a lot from the comp.unix groups...

Cheers,