What is the current status of Usenet? [closed]

"Google Groups hosts an archive of the Usenet that goes back to 1981. This archive includes what was formerly known as DejaNews which was purchased by Google in 2001. Groups is a web gateway that gives you access to all current Usenet newsgroup activity as well as Google's own proprietary groups. The two appear the same but Google created groups are not part of the Usenet. A tad confusing at first.

Usenet traffic continues to grow but this is primarily binary in nature. Lots of warez and porn. A full feed is currently over 4.5 TB per day. The discussion newsgroups that I used to frequent back in the 80's and 90's have mostly fallen into disuse and are clogged with spam. Sad in a way but time marches on."

"Before google, there was dejanews. deja was bought by google. If you go to dejanews.com you are still redirected to google groups. Google bought all the archives because of the invaluable knowledge contained in the usenet archives, but as for fresh content, it's basically dead. The idea behind the newsgroups was to have a fully visible discussion environment for a specific topic. newsgroups filled the void of mailing lists, blogs, Q/A sites and file sharing during a time where traffic was low and men were men. Once that gap was filled, the huge amount of band required to keep newsgroups syncronized was the nail in the coffin for the technology. I remember that we had a news server on our LUG machine. Every night it had to synchronize 3 gigabytes of data through a 256 kbps connection (I am talking 1997), and we left out all the binaries groups.

So, usenet is dead for the future, but very, very important for the past it contains. It's archaeology, and an invaluable heritage."

"still lots of good groups out there like alt.binaries.movies.divx, the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* hierarchy, etc.

Worth checking out is easynews.com, which offers a free trial so you can see for yourself what's going on."

According to Wikipedia (bottom of that section), many ISPs no longer provide access to Usenet, so it's almost certainly not used as much as it once was.