Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

There are private NZB sites where the NZBs themselves are not indicative of the context -- hashed titles, with password protected files. I work for a Usenet provider - it's still very much alive both for discussions and for file sharing. You just have to be very savvy.

I am a former usenet user. I used it first for actual discussion threads (like HN!) but later for binary content. I tried it again a couple years ago and the commons are being abused. An example of it is password-protected binary content that requires going to a website to get the password which of course requires additional actions like viewing an ad or signing up for a large number of mailing lists (with embedded referral codes). There are indexers that help find content that does not suffer from this problem but they come and go.

I still would like to use usenet for that content I can't get on Netflix/Amazon/HBO/Redbox but the effort required is too much -- I'll settle for watching something else. I also feel better about actual paying for the content I consume. I have my fingers crossed that we'll see more and more of the unstreamable content come to streaming providers.

There's still "eternal-september.org", which offers the non-binary USENET groups. The "comp.lang" hierarchy is still widely used, and the main discussions of changes to the C and C++ standard are still on USENET.

There is almost no spam.

Usenet (NNTP) is a protocol somewhat similar to email. Unlike email, the default communication style is in "groups" (sort of like a mailing list for a specific topic). One posts individual messages (like one email) to a group; replies are threaded, much like mailing list discussions. Historically the groups were organized somewhat hierarchically.

The end result, with a good news reader program, is somewhat like a large global collection of topic-specific forums.

Binary posts are just a bunch of posts to the same group with a message Subject matching some pattern (usually with ascending numbers counting the posts). The content is encoded to work around the limitations of the protocol and/or provider. Historically this was "uuencode", but you can also do base64 (like email attachments) and the new jazz (hah! New in 2003, anyway) is "yEnc." yEnc relies on 8-bit safe NNTP servers and only encodes the few characters not permissible in NNTP messages (periods at the beginning of lines, I forget the rest). So you get much better encode ratios (~101-102% of original size) than with something like base64 (133% of original size).

NNTP providers, especially in binary groups, are subject to occasional message loss. So posters will typically generate Reed-Solomon forward-error-correction blocks using a program called "par2." This allows one to download binaries that are missing some messages, as well as some additional FEC (potentially on an as-needed basis), and rebuild the original content. Generating and recovering from par2 files is extremely computationally expensive.

One-stop shopping and the legal "protection" of not appearing on a bittorrent peer list. (It's still illegal, but less detectable.)

The media companies have largely caught on to Usenet and have been issuing automated DMCAs on Usenet content immediately since the early 2010s. Since the posts are stored on a centralized server, the providers can and do comply with DMCA takedowns with automated software. As a result, popular TV and Movies with correct titles are usually taken down quickly.