I am also in that basket. To me Usenet seems like another, older protocol that achieves practically the same thing. If someone is more knowledgeble, feel free to correct me or explain further.

No problem. You can use extensions like LibRedirect in order to make it automatically change SO to this one.

I really like using code.whatever.social as an alternative frontend to Stack Overflow. It has way less distractions and allows me to only look at the question and the answers and nothing else.