Google Groups Has Been Left To Die (ahelwer.ca) 85
An anonymous reader shares a blog: Google Groups is dying. Its epitaph is not yet inscribed on the Killed by Google website, but the end is easily seen from here (although it should also be noted its death was called as early as 13 years ago). The deficiencies in Google Groups search, supposedly Google's forte, have long been noted. Lately though basic features have just stopped working. Why care? Google Groups is, for whatever reason, the de-facto standard community website in the formal methods community. TLA+ uses it, PRISM uses it, SMT-LIB uses it, and a number of other tools I could find at least have presences on the platform. These communities take time to build: their value resides in the number of people who think of them first whenever they want to ask a question or just talk about these tools. Many websites link to these groups or to specific answers.
What's broken? Beyond search's perpetual brokenness, Monospace fonts have just stopped rendering. This makes code samples significantly more difficult to read. Then (precipitating this post) messages or replies submitted to the group have started intermittently just self-deleting. Not in a graceful way, either: the post will successfully be submitted, but then all that will show up is a deleted message. Hope you didn't spend twenty minutes typing a thorough, detailed response! My attempt to submit a link to this very post also deleted itself.
What's broken? Beyond search's perpetual brokenness, Monospace fonts have just stopped rendering. This makes code samples significantly more difficult to read. Then (precipitating this post) messages or replies submitted to the group have started intermittently just self-deleting. Not in a graceful way, either: the post will successfully be submitted, but then all that will show up is a deleted message. Hope you didn't spend twenty minutes typing a thorough, detailed response! My attempt to submit a link to this very post also deleted itself.
Google groups needs to die (Score:3, Interesting)
First it gobbled up dejanews, then it fucked that up beyond repair. Then it re-imagined itself as a yahoo groups ripoff... and that pig came down, hard.
I really hope someone else can get the archive and open it up for posterity in a less ham-handed way. Because what google made of it, just doesn't work and that has been obvious to all who knew USENET for decades.
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Which does raise the question: If Google Groups shuts down, how am I going to find all the embarrassing crap I posted to Usenet in the mid 1980s?
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I was going to ask a similar question. Anyone know if the Wayback Machine covers USENET?
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It certainly *should* -- and the text groups are small potatoes (size-wise) compared to the other stuff it archives.
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Archive.org does have a lot of Usenet data, but it's not easily searchable and possibly incomplete.
https://archive.org/details/us... [archive.org]
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Funny you should mention dejanews. They were a fantastic USENET archive until the UI changed. This was years before the Digg fiasco and the almost fiasco of Slashdot Beta. Whenever a site had a bad UI change I used to say "It got deja'd" but that never caught on. I think Digg probably holds the dubious distinction for worst UI change in most people's minds.
Why would anyone invest in Google Products? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if cities were like Google:
News report: "Googletown has announced the completion of a new freeway, new municipal water service, new high speed internet service, new waste water service and new electrical service into the recently annexed district and is inviting home developers to build up to 5000 new family homes!"
2 years later....
News Report: "Googletown announces they will be demoing the freeway, and plugging all water and wastewater lines, and shutting off electrical service to the entire annex district, that was opened to home builders only two years ago..."
I can't imagine any developer ever wanted to invest their company in a Google product.
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Google keeps shooting its app reputation in the foot. No serious company will trust their future to any Google product, knowing their record of pulling the plug the minute it shows red ink on their profit reports.
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Right. I mean, it's not even just limited to software companies. I can't imagine any company investing in, say, Google ChromeOS. Google's history shows that they are likely to pull the plug on ChromeOS at any time leaving your company with a mound of worthless laptops.
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Waymo is another example. Google had a huge technological lead in SDVs, but then slowly strangled it by keeping it in perpetual beta.
I know several people who worked for Waymo but defected to Tesla where their hard work has real-world effects.
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Isn't Teslas self-driving program also in perpetual beta?
It's not like you can actually use it for the purpose it was designed for.
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Not sure that is really true. Waymo has been making steady progress and now has a reliable system that is years ahead of everyone else in the business.
Telsa have a janky system that needs constant human oversight and is nowhere near being fully self driving. It's not clear if it will ever work properly.
Re:Why would anyone invest in Google Products? (Score:4, Informative)
Google is following the early days style of trying to be like a college campus. This includes making lots of one-off projects that sound good but then get abandoned later when the author graduates. Experiments! Google is experimenting. This is all well and good, but it's treating the users like guinea pigs.
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> Google is following the early days style of trying to be like a college campus...Experiments!
But one assumed each start-up was independent. Google's "experiments" are all under the same management, meaning you know the app is on a short leash.
Most were also trivial web-toys back then. You kicked the tires and played around, but never assumed it would be around 10 years down the road. But if a serious business knows something is likely to be zapped within 10 years, they won't devote their content and tr
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The problem is people DO (Score:5, Insightful)
No serious company will trust their future to any Google product
The big problem, and I mean a very big problem, is that many many companies, from small business to major corporations, DO trust significant workflow to Google. That's why we are constantly inundated with stories like these, where someone has been left hanging by lack of support, failures, or downright maliciousness on the part of Google.
It's easy to say migrate away, but it's bigger than Google. Corporations needs to insist on owning their own data and the entirety of their workflow infrastructure. That doesn't mean don't rent rack space or virtual servers. Renting space is fine. Relinquishing control and adopting their paradigms isn't. Corporations and people need to insist that no, we do not want a Google account, Apple ID account, or Microsoft account to be a basic requirement of using an operating system. These things put us at Google and others' beck and call and leave us open to the literal extortion they practice.
No free solution outside your control has ever been cheaper than the paid-for solution you operate.
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The power might go out, the water main might break..
You buy a generator or plan to close down show, you keep a few cased of bottled water in the storage room and tell everyone but a handful operators to head home.
With most of what you stated about the cloud the answer is backups, and making sure at least one (recent) generation of those backups goes to some other platform.
The real issue of course is your process is tied to their tech stack; having your data is one thing but being ready to use is another sto
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There's a big difference between using Google and their cloud services, and relying on a Google specific product in your products. Companies continue to trust Google to provide them services, however there seems to be a large mistrust in integration of Google products into other products, especially since the depreciation of the Nest API without any automated failover mechanism to the new Google Assistant.
Hope you didn't buy that smart washing machine for it's smart features.
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People whose workflows depend on Google should be paying them. If they aren't paying them, they can't be too upset when that free service goes away.
Google is actually reasonably good about keeping paid services going, and giving very long notice periods if they do shut them down or make breaking changes. Google Maps is a good example of that, apps writing using its API 15 years ago still work fine today.
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Yeah I'd rather use Azure than Google Cloud. And that's saying something.
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Microsoft has a relatively good record of gradually deprecating their stuff of late. They rarely outright yank it, just provide gradually less support until it's obviously too hard for an org to keep it.
Re:Why would anyone invest in Google Products? (Score:4, Funny)
"We are shutting down the municipal fire department due to under usage. Turns out houses weren't burning down at the frequency we expected to make a profit on."
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"We are also shutting down the 911 system entirely because the manager spearheading the project got bored of the project, moved on to another program and hasn't updated it in 3 months."
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It's more akin to shutting down the service that shovels the horse manure from the streets.
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You joke but that's literally how it used to work. Private fire fighting companies only bothered to have stations near profitable areas.
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You imply a good argument, that the "residents" of Google's services should have an avenue for buying them from Google, perhaps even legally mandated, if they're active but abandoned by the company.
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So, you're a Google Fiber customer?
Telecoms (Score:2)
I can't imagine any developer ever wanted to invest their company in a Google product.
We developed a product/system using GSM/GPRS. Acquired millions of dollars of equipment.
Oh, sorry. 3G is going away. Guess you have to buy all new 4G equipment. But trust us. We'll never pull that trick on you again.
At least with Google, you can always have someone else build you an equivalent product. Because the Internet is still there. Try getting that bandwidth back that you used to have your own license for.
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Imagine if cities were like Google:
You get Detroit. Google and some cities are not so different. Just the timescale varies.
I can't imagine any developer ever wanted to invest their company in a Google product.
I honestly think they shat the bed quite a bit with "Work with Nest". They fucked a lot of developers there when they depreciated the API without an automatic fallover to Google Assistant requiring developers to push firmware updates to old devices.
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It's more like them demolishing the log cabin that some employee built by working on it every Friday afternoon.
Google's policy was 20% of work time dedicated to personal projects, of which Google Groups was one. The idea was to have internal start-ups, some of which would become profitable. The guy who developed Groups went on to re-use some of the code for Gmail.
That's what you have to remember with Google products - they might just be someone's pet project, and if it went public there is a good chance tha
Internet searchability (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a golden era of Internet accessibility, somewhere between when 2000 and 2010, when there were numerous search engine options - including Google - and they were all pretty good at helping you find things. That era extended for quite a while, perhaps almost as long as Google had the "Don't Be Evil" rule/principle.
The days of all of that are long behind us now. It's almost impossible to find something twice, even if you know exact terms of what you're looking for, if it's "aged out" and not immediately relevant. It's nearly impossible to find independent/third party information due to the search bias present on all the search engines which point you to the latest news and corporate domains.
This state has only worsened in the era of Facebook, as once-useful forums were overwhelmed with spam and the communities migrated to Facebook, where finding anything is effectively impossible.
We've basically gone full circle from carefully curated bookmarks, to search being useful enough that you didn't have to, back around to having to use bookmarks because of search being useless. Add to that the fact that even finding the information in the first place...
It's a dark time.
Re:Internet searchability (Score:5, Interesting)
The days of all of that are long behind us now. It's almost impossible to find something twice, even if you know exact terms of what you're looking for, if it's "aged out" and not immediately relevant.
"If it's aged out" my ass. A more accurate explanation would be "if it doesn't align with the monetization goals of the platform."
It's not just "exact search terms" either. Pretty much every search engine shows you "things we think you're looking for (that align with our monetization strategy)" rather than "things that you searched for." Quotations, minuses, no matter how you scope your search, all of these things will be ignored in favor of "things we think you're looking for (that align with our monetization strategy)"
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It is not just bookmarks, which I have been saving since Y2K, but I have taken to using "print to PDF" for useful web pages that might disappear, and downloading books and articles on subjects I am interested in. All of this gets saved to a data drive with subject folders and sub-folders so I can find them again, or use Windows search (which takes longer) if I forget where I put it. Everything gets a useful file name, source, and year.
All this takes time, but better than losing stuff to the fog of search.
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I'm with you, to a point. I'm 63 & back in the day we backedup up stuff, religiously. But Hamsterdance & Jennicam - really?
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I would love to be able to back up all of comp.unix.shell (nee unix.shell.group) or failing that, get it on a DVD set. You have *no* idea how much knowledge is about to be lost.
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If you are just looking to search file names, Swiftsearch [sourceforge.net] makes it real quick.
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I'd love to have a system to automatically archive a web page I find useful to local storage - sort of like an archive.org, but contextual to my own needs, that I could go back and reference with a full-text search tool of my own.... retaining full online references. That'd be amazing.
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You can't find the same thing twice, agree 100%, but it's actually down to the bloody ad injection not the search criteria.
Says a lot really, ads are more important to them than the sodding results.. S'why Amazon/Google is such garbage these days.
Q has anyone, ever, bought anything directly influenced by a google/amazon ad?
No. ? Thought not.
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Bah... the internet has never been the same since Yahoo bought Geocities and shut it down.
I miss all those webpages punctuated by blocks of flashing bod text and littered with banner-ads.
Sigh! :-)
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Most of that material is now on Facebook, so it's still easy to avoid.
Re: Internet searchability (Score:2)
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The goal is "You'll own nothing and be happy", and not being able to find anything is a prelude.
There is a specter haunting the Internet though. The specter of communism, with extra mustard.
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You're not wrong, though I'd argue it's more aptly described as corporate feudalism. Some people call this style of control fascism, but that, I feel, is a bit of a political hotbutton word which just brings emotions into the situation.
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Yes, I agree and hesitated to just say "communism" and wanted the "extra mustard" to be something people imagined as a transcendence of the earlier "capital vs. labor" tension. It all kind of breaks down when the peasants own stocks. If we're all capitalists, who's Capital? See also, "We've met the enemy and he is us".
An "Anonymous Reader" (Score:1)
I'm sure the submitter is not the blogger whose post is the only link here. Yup yup.
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NSS!
mailman? (Score:2)
I don't see what prevents them to migrate to... GNU mailman. Might not be pretty, but old and tried, and maintained. Use it on cheap hosting and let google index its archive.
There is a comparison Google Groups vs mailman, the main difference seems to be "Mailman does not provide its own integrated mail server with webmail component, nor does it have a files section or a calendar function." https://wiki.list.org/DOC/Is%2... [list.org] which I don't think they use in their case.
Has It Been Confirmed (Score:3)
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E: Profit?
Re: Has It Been Confirmed (Score:2)
Do not trust Google (Score:3)
In fact, do not depend on any of their services in any way. Google is now like Microsoft: The only thing they care about is making money and screw the customer.
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Good luck getting through to people addicted to Gmail.
Wait, that's me.
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How can you get "addicted" to a fucking MUA?
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Through years of use, I am extremely comfortable with the GUI presented by Gmail. (I'm more used to the Web UI than the app but both are pretty comfortable.) When I had to start using Outlook for work back in 2019, its limitations annoyed me almost daily. I'm used to it now but I still prefer Gmail.
Switching back to a FOSS MUI like Thunderbird (which I used exclusively for about eight years in the aughties) would, I fear, cause me a significant amount of distress. It might result in my monitor breaking be
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You've demonstrated precisely how you can trust Google. You trust they will do what they can to make money and that gives you a specific list of services you can depend on.
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Well, yes in a sense. If enough morons depend on it is slowly becomes a non-moronic thing to do. It is still high-risk because Google sometimes even kills things that are widely popular or make them money. They are too rich to really care.
It's More Than Just Google (Score:3)
I don't disagree that Google has abandoned Google Groups, but it's far more than just their groups. We've seen forums usage fall across the web. We've seen newsgroup usage fall. It's far more than just Google Groups.
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Old forums, obviously not Slashdot, but most classic forums are actually having a good time right now where they’re still alive.
If you’re interested in something other than honest talk, be it trolling, abusing random idiots, manipulating public opinion, or advertising, the ROI from a busy little internet hole in the wall is not high enough compared to Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, 4chan, etc.
Slashdot sucks because it’s barely moderated but lately the mods seem to have taken in interest in snu
USENET (Score:3)
Resurrect USENET. There are free/open-source Net News servers available and plenty of free clients. Maybe having it decentralized rather than in control of a giant corporation was a feature, not a bug?
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I would like to think that that is the answer. I really would. Unfortunately, while block lists were just about adequate to keep the signal to noise ratio high enough back in the day, I fear it would be a losing battle at the scale of today's internet.
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Unfortunately, while block lists were just about adequate to keep the signal to noise ratio high enough back in the day, I fear it would be a losing battle at the scale of today's internet.
Don't you think most of the internet at this point would just wash right on by completely text based groups?
I think the real answer though, is probably move those people to Reddit and make a new topical Subreddit.
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Don't you think most of the internet at this point would just wash right on by completely text based groups?
Only mostly text based. USENET did grow MIME eventually.
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Only mostly text based. USENET did grow MIME eventually.
Oh yeah, I guess it did... I mostly stayed away from groups with images. ;-)
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The handful of newsgroups I still follow actually don't have that much spam posted to them. It isn't nonexistent, but my email server easily sees orders of magnitude more spam (most of which is nuked before I see it, but more gets through than I'd like). comp.sys.raspberry-pi, comp.misc, and comp.sys.apple2 see moderat
Workspace (Score:4, Insightful)
Google Groups? (Score:3)
Usenet the is death bed of trolls (Score:1)
spam (Score:2)
I agree Google has not done well as a USENET steward (foremost being requiring a Google login to search and read it). But USENET groups pretty much died due to spam (and inability to screen out spam) anyhow.
Re: spam (Score:3)
I use GG frequently, and not only is Usenet still pretty active, but it seems the spam has gone down from how it was a decade or so ago. Because the spammers see Usenet as a dead end and a money sink.
Re: spam (Score:2)
In fact the only spam I've seen in recent years was from people off their meds obsessing over a particular poster or some political subject that has a bee in their bonnet.
INN server (USENET) is still maintained (Score:2)
Don't bring attention to it.. (Score:2)
..because Google will again try to "improve the user experience", and make it even worse than they did the last time which wasn't all that long ago.
So what? (Score:1)
I've used USENET since 1990. That's 33 years, but almost never use google groups. I still read news. I suppose it's nice that google indexed the content and provided an interface. You can still get access elsewhere.
My complaint is that some groups have been taken over by off-topic illegal/barely legal drug and other spam. Posts of this nature outnumber legit posts in these groups. USENET will likely continue to be around for decades.
Why care? (Score:2)
Still waiting for a reason to care.
Okay, sure, I'd care if I was in one of those communities. But this ain't exactly rocket science. Go build your own server. With blackjack! And hookers! Or whatever you formal-methods kids are into these days.
You'll lose all your existing stuff? Why? Take it with you. Exp
Why Google Groups Demise is a Tragedy (Score:1)
The following points bear mention:
(1) Newsgroups are based on an IETF standard http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc977 [ietf.org] so anyone can provide a server and anyone can write a newsgroup reader.
(2) Embedding a Newsgroup in a Web page is (was) a great way to add a standards-based discussion forum to a Website where the forum GUI was
Are you people CHILDREN? (Score:1)
Do you not know about USENET? Dejanews started archiving backwards, and I really hoped to find my first post in 1994. Look at the number next to my name -- SIX DIGITS! Google absorbed it and then crippled it -- dejanews' search function was really good, but google took out a lot of the options. BUT you could still read news with Thunderbird and a lot of special purpose newsreaders, and there were a number of NNTP servers. This one below is free, has a large number of groups and reasonable retention. Go