The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material.
I still can't believe everyone got away with non-threaded forums vs. newsgroups when the Internets became mainstream.
Also, Google had its own share when they acquired Dejanews and broke the search.
The weird thing is that mail actually managed to survive both.
I always wished that at least the NNTP protocol would prove to be more resilient. It would be a great secondary entry point for basically any online forum, similar to what RSS does for news feeds. Give me nntp://news.ycombinator.com, so that I could read and post via GNUS/Thunderbird/tin…
But yes, having it for real and being able to browse in a properly-threaded netnews client, hide subthreads you don't care for, and never have to click on "More" only to see "Unknown or expired link" because you took too long to read the first n messages - these would all be great, plus extra geek cred.
Agreed, and definitely sad.
Last time I looked, even the binaries groups seemed to be mainly full of bots posting identical executable binaries (presumably malware) under thousands of different names per group, per day.
Although most text groups are now so dead that even the spammers have left. Maybe it could be reclaimed, if anyone could be bothered?
But few people are interested in making Usenet a better space to live in. Follow the money and look at how many sites are essentially proprietary discussion groups.