Not necessarily command line.
It's been maybe five years or so since I posted on Usenet, but in the days when I did so from home, I used an application with a GUI interface which seems still to be available:
http://haller-berlin.de/macsoup/index.html
Although when I found about about Usenet in the late 1980s, yep, it was command line all the way.
Memories - well, it was always very useful for solving IT problems. But there was all those binary groups too, which I didn't make a huge amount of use of. I still recall looking at the long list of alt.binaries groups available via BT Internet's Usenet server back in the 1990s and being, well, quite surprised to find that my ISP BT Internet was providing access to the newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children. No of course I didn't download anything from it, and it did vanish after a while. My mind still boggles at BT Internet's Usenet server *ever* providing swift and direct access to child sex abuse images.
If you're interested in the discussions rather than the binaries, TU Berlin offers access for € 10 a year:
http://news.individual.net/index.php
Biting the hand that feeds IT
