Why would anyone decide to use USENET these days? (lemmy.darkc0de.one)

submitted 17 hours ago by resterWink@lemmy.darkc0de.one to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I'm not asking about how it is used for warez, since that is what it mostly hosting at this point... Nor am I asking why anyone should or should not start a community on USENET (many reasons why you wouldn't/couldn't).

Instead, I am asking why someone would only decide to engage with the textual, traditional, conversational aspects of USENET over modern tools like lemmy?

I could name a few I suppose:

Relative anonymity
Access to a large amount of history
Nostalgia
Communication with those who still frequent newsgroups

I don't know how many more there are but I would like to hear your guys' opinions in regards to those listed above and any others I may have missed.

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[-] one_old_coder@piefed.social 41 points 17 hours ago

Text is faster than a web browser. No JS. High quality conversations.

[-] dontgogettingtooclever@piefed.social 8 points 14 hours ago

This may it sound like a silly question but what kind of high quality conversations? It's been so long since I've used USENET. I'm not even sure how you connect with conversations on there.

[-] one_old_coder@piefed.social 9 points 14 hours ago

I remember talking to real experts in programming and C++. Hacker News used to be like that, but they became stupid with AI.

[-] NABDad@lemmy.world 10 points 8 hours ago

Back in the before time, I was having a problem getting a new ethernet card working in Linux. I posted a question in USENET, and got a reply from the guy who wrote the driver for the NIC. I supplied the info he asked for and he got the driver working for the new NIC.

this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026

58 points (95.3% liked)

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