In this specific case? Only the nerds used it, and most people didn't even know it existed. We could have educated them about it, but making a forum and sending out an email was easier.
No understanding of what happened with Usenet is complete without the important aspect of how it came to be used for sharing massive amounts of binaries, most of them copyright infringing.
Even so, it wasn't until a lot of major ISPs got rid of their usenet servers that it was more of an effort to access. Verizon had theirs up to about 2008 or so, yet binaries were commonplace well before that.
In this specific case? Only the nerds used it, and most people didn't even know it existed. We could have educated them about it, but making a forum and sending out an email was easier.