Newsgroups might be too technical to engage in for newcomers, especially if they're already *very* busy trying to make this new software they've downloaded (Wine) work and everything's failing right and left around their ears with odd 'FontForge' messages, seh_exception overflows and what not.
Costs (worse first in my own opinion):
- Convince existing users to configure their newsreader.
I think the above point is enough to be a showstopper for the newsgroup approach.
Well, you may think that, but really, it's not. They had to configure their mail client for email, and since most (if not all) mail clients still used double as a news reader, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle... [...]
Segin is right saying it's not much harder to configure a newsgroup than it is to configure regular mail.
When I started using the net in 1998 or so, I really didn't like newsgroups. I stayed away from them for a very long time, until I came across Google Groups. Google taps so well into newsgroups that now I think all mailing lists of the world should be turned into a newsgroup :-)
(Note I keep advocating this suggestion because I'm quite convinced of its advantage but I'm not making that personal a personal matter at all.)