Usenet is older than torrenting. Significantly older. Even older than the WWW IIRC... Every few years the newer generation "discovers it" and realizes you can totally saturate your connection, even with relatively obscure things that would typically need a significant number of seeds to be able to do.
And then it falls to the wayside again, because retention times kinda suck as no one wants to keep petabytes of data for ultra-long term. That and most of the indexers still alive today fucking suck.