Is usenet,netnews still used? For what concrete ? Or do people use a mordern variant ?
Censorship is one of the multitude of problems of reddit and even Hacker News. I know people who are experts in their field and can't post in either place because some moderator didn't like their comment about something. Which means both places lose their expertise. That makes me question how many such experts are banned from them.our times in which censorship is gaining impulse.
It's riddled with spam
People have moved away a long time ago to mailing list for smaller degree, and web based forums to a much bigger degree, and stuff like Facebook.
Unless you want to leech some binaries, Usenet is irrelevant today.
Censorship is rising everywhere, specially regarding news and politics, sure in Europe much worse than in USA.Of course, I'm not sure experts in their field go to such places cause they have better things to do. I've often questioned such people, in the past, and some of them have only heard of reddit or HN but have never gone there.
This doesn't change the fact that a whole generation of internet users grew up without knowing what NNTP is
Nobody goes there looking for discussions since decades, or even bothers to hook himself up to get access to, because it is so irrelevant.
It is not just AOL who shut down their NNTP servers
Nowadays Usenet is either used for leeching binaries, or by some niche hobby enthusiasts, which are quite few.
Usenet doesn't have a web interface. Although there were (are?) some web gateways, this certainly isn't the norm. And while CAPTCHA keeps some spammers out it's certainly not foolproof (judging by the number of spammers I regularly delete here on the forums).Against spam you might need something like "CAPTCHA I'm not a robot".
the point is if Usenet is still relevant or dead nowadays.