> As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much friction.

Really? I'm old enough to remember when Google bought Deja, and with it suddenly came the ability to search the entire Usenet archive going back to its inception, through the Google Groups interface. Being able to search the archives of comp.lang.whatever was a great educational and productivity booster, like Stackoverflow before SO.