Providers are rapidly dropping Usenet because they see it as a losing business. In ways, they're right; monetizing the system is difficult, because most of the folks still using it are technically savvy enough to filter out context-sensitive advertising, and many of the carriers lack the technical competencies necessary to filter out the majority of spam. Which saddens me; Usenet remains an always on, scalable, successful discussion engine that's as useful as it was three decades ago.

The fact it's basically a ghost town for most groups now is a sign that newer services, while not necessarily better, are certainly more popular, and people have shifted their social circles and online presences in order to accommodate.

As far as text-based Usenet is concerned, I use nntp://nntp.aioe.org, since it provides anonymous read and write access with reasonable quotas and excellent spam filtering. It's been down a few times, but it's much better than Google Groups or what flaky ISP servers remain.