The usenet list is for maintenance of the news servers.
There are a lot of people on usenet; a few of them actually read and, if appropriate, answer the mail that gets sent to it.
There is a separate list "usenet-grunge" that gets control messages (messages creating and removing newsgroups); no one actually gets this list in mail, but several people read the discuss meeting for it.
Discuss meetings:
bloom-picayune.mit.edu:/usr/spool/discuss/usenet
charon.mit.edu:/usr/spool/discuss/usenet-grunge
bloom-picayune.mit.edu:/usr/spool/discuss/usenet-stats
This meeting archives status reports from senator-bedfellow, the news server that newsreaders connect to. Currently, it archives two status reports each day, one report giving some statistics for the whole day, and a second report giving various load indicators for each fifteen-minute interval during the day. This meeting does NOT archive the status reports sent to usenet.
charon.mit.edu:/usr/spool/discuss/usenet-archive
This meeting is for permanent archives of usenet information. Currently, it is used for just about nothing. Some information is archived in /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/news/notes instead.