I know I’ll catch shit for this but I kinda don’t mind shorts. Sometimes I don’t have anything specific to watch and I just wanna waste 10 mins…
The content quality varies wildly and it doesn’t seem to have a very good algorithm but it succeeds in helping me burn 5-10 mins while I’m waiting on someone or something.
I think YouTube expects people to burn hours on it like TikTok but I don’t see that happening.
Reality tv is hit or miss depending on popularity and how old it is. Retention plays a part is this too, but most Usenet providers worth subbing to have crazy long retention times.
I personally use Sonarr for tv and it’s stupid easy to use (once everything is set up!), you just search for your show and it knows when it airs and auto-grabs new episodes. You can also tell it to look for past seasons.
The whole “getting Usenet setup and running” is a little more complicated than I’d like to get into with this post, but you’ll need the following: a Usenet provider, an indexer (both of these will cost money but it’s not a lot and annual payments, or lifetime, is usually the way to go), a newsreader (I use SABnzbd), and a web app to track shows and initiate searches (I use Sonarr, as previously mentioned).
I’m sure someone else here can post a link to a good guide to getting started with Usenet if that’s the direction you want to go.
TLDR: it depends on the show