~30 years ago, the barrier to entry was minimal. There were many free news servers out there, and it was common for your ISP to offer one. Good client software was easy to find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort%C3%A9_Agent)

And yeah, the best part about usenet was that there were fewer "average people" on there. The Internet was great before AoL connected everybody else to it ;)