It's a shame that Usenet is so underused. I think NNTP is a far suprior protocol for having online discussions, and I think it's a shame that it's been superseded by greatly inferior web forums. With Usenet, you run your own native client, putting the control in your hands. There's far more flexibility in terms of how to view posts. E.g., threading (which few web forums support). You can killfile a person or topics you don't want to see. More generally, the philosophy is that each individual decides what they want to see - unlike web-forums, where it's common for someone to complain about something, because it can only be changed server-side.
You also don't have mods who lock topics for no good reason other than they're not interested in the topic, or one person was trolling - something which the design of many webforums (this one included) encourages.
There's also no reason why you couldn't use NNTP for a private newsserver that wasn't part of Usenet (thus avoiding the usual anti-Usenet arguments of spam and trolls). I have seen one e-mailing list that had a NNTP mirror, but unfortunately this seems very rare.
