As a long-time (VERY long-time) veteran of Usenet, I'd like to point out that it's
quite viable. The anti-spam methods now in place are quite a bit better than what
we had just a few years ago. There are a number of newsgroups that are doing
very well (including a lot of technical ones), some that are languishing, and some
that are on hold.
Usenet has a lot of architectural features that make it very good for these kinds of
discussions: it is privacy-friendly. It's text-based. it's easily gatewayed to and from
email. It's easily archived. (I have many, many years of certain newsgroups.) It
requires modest resources. It's resilient in the face of broken sites and broken
network links. It's bandwidth-friendly. It runs on relatively lightweight hardware.
The software is mature. And so on.
Not that it's perfect: of course it's not, and I can probably enumerate its flaws
better than all but a handful of other people. But it works, and it works well
even when other allegedly more sophisticated mechanisms fail. I've long said
that Usenet proficiency is one of the basic qualifications for system and
network administrators: they don't need to know the ins/outs of NNTP
nor do they need to admin a node, but they do need to know how to use it.
Since /. appears to be intent on committing public suicide via this idiotic Beta,
supported exclusively by the imbicles and morons at Dice, perhaps it's
time to start migrating back to Usenet, where corporations can't exert
the kind of control they can here.