OT: The future of USENET?

[Quartz]

>Is USENET coming to its end?

Yes, for better or worse. It's been a slow downward spiral since the 
late 90's. I can't speak for other countries, but in the US the majority 
of ISPs started dropping access as a cost cutting measure since your 
average layman didn't really understand or use it. Younger generations 
in turn never knew it existed and ended up reinventing most of the 
functionality with web forums. Not helping matters is that, due to a 
couple isolated cases, the news media ignorantly view usenet as a haven 
for child porn and pirate movies, so there's increasing clamor to shut 
it down. There were a few 3rd party companies here and there that 
offered dedicated access, but most of them have closed up shop by this 
point due to social/political pressure.

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it has a certain smooth-brained appeal