It’s becoming more and more rare to see quality binary attachments posted that are not in yEnc format.
We are also seeing the number of Usenet groups that have fresh content decrease, as supergroups evolve that contain the majority of Usenet’s quality content.
Usually, yEnc will take over an entire news group, and all downloaders of that group end up having to find a yEnc decoder solution.
Most high volume groups transition to yEnc rather quickly. Therefore, due to the high volume posted to these supergroups, and the decreasing number of groups, the percentage of content that is posted using yEnc is very high.
Interestingly, spam is typically not posted with yEnc. Spammers want to reach the largest audience, so they don’t want to exclude those without yEnc decoders.
Therefore, yEnc use is also becoming a good indicator of legitimate content. Content that is not yEnc encoded is more and more likely spam. New posters, or infrequent posters, also may not have the proper tools to post in yEnc, but the quality of their content is marginal for most categories.
Even the yEnc test newsgroup will sometimes have some surprisingly good content, and it’s mostly barren of spam.
As the ability of news servers to filter out spam increases, and the amount of spam on peer to peer systems increases, Usenet is making gains over other file sharing methods.
I believe that the popularity of Usenet is likely to spike up in the near future, barring unforeseen, new alternatives. In addition, yEnc usage will continue to increase until it has mostly saturated the binary newsgroups.