I think what you miss is the time when only the intelligent and sensible <10% of the population are on-line. There was no social network, so Usenet was where th

I think what you miss is the time when only the intelligent and sensible <10% of the population are on-line. There was no social network, so Usenet was where the cool kids hanged out. Now that everyone is on-line, and dragged 99% of the intelligent and sensible people over to social networks, so the remaining 0.1% of the population is not large enough to make Usenet interesting any more.