The real story is less the death of Usenet than the death of the NNTP
protocol.

NNTP was designed to make it easier to read mailing lists and to reduce
the amount of bandwidth used. The problem is that it does not scale, no
newsgroup works with more than about 150 active members and the reader
/ writer ratio tends to be at least 1 poster for 10 lurkers. So each
group is a community of about 1500 people.

The problem with usenet is that every post is sent to every NNTP server
whether it is going to be read or not. It worked when the average
number of readers per site was 5. Today the average number of times a
post is read is about 0.1 on the busy servers and on the small ones
0.01 times or less.

Weblogs and RSS feeds are dramatically more efficient than NNTP.

Its not only AOL that has dumped NNTP, my provider Comcast now wants a
separate payment for news. So I now read through google groups.