Google Groups has been left to die • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#101

Post by david_allison » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #29

What's really crazy to me is that I'm on a local Google Group for the cycling community in the city I'm in. I somewhat regularly fish stuff out of my Gmail spam folder that went from Someone's personal gmail account -> Google Group -> My Gmail account. The message never left Google's infrastructure, and it's still being flagged as spam! They should have a lot of insight into those messages and be able to ascertain th…

This also happens with Google-owned projects. A fair amount of Google Summer of Code communication goes to spam.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#102

Post by shagie » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

jdulay19 wrote: post #48

As an outsider, why wouldn't anyone just migrate this to Slack/Discord/etc?

The question is "what type of interaction are you after?"

Chat systems are good for the "I need help now" and "I want to chat..." but for some things a single message takes an hour or day or more thought to formulate a proper response.

In those situations, the real time nature of chat causes discussions of a topic to become disjoint.

USENET, email, forums and the like can have single topic threads / chains / posts where one topic is followed across days or weeks or months which is sometimes needed for hard problems.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#103

Post by summerlight » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

Not sure why it has a perception of being abandoned. IIRC, it still has a considerably larger team compared to other real dying products. Also it has a clear role inside the Google Workspace. It's obviously prioritizing enterprise users, but it doesn't necessarily mean public groups are being shut down anytime soon.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#104

Post by mynameisvlad » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

coreyp_1 wrote: post #62

scrollaway wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And anyone who comments on Google-related topics with the link to killedbygoogle is beating a dead horse... So tired of that argument.

Actually, I didn't know about the site, so I'm glad that the comment was posted. It seems like a great resource for project idea prompts that can be taken, modified/customized/generalized/specialized into something new!

It's also mentioned and linked to in the second sentence of the article.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#105

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#106

Post by superkuh » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

jmclnx wrote: post #7

As someone who uses a "real" usenet site and reader, cannot wait until google groups is gone. One of the many issues is "comp.lang.c++" items from google is being sent to "comp.lang.c" because a change google made cannot handle the "++". The sad thing is we may loose the history that came from dejanews, I was one of the many people who were very upset when dejanews was bought by google. No surprise it morphed into th…

Usenet still exists and is actually getting better with time. There's not much spam and the only people there left are geeks that care about the topic. The eternal september is over and it's time to start again. You can get text only access for your usenet client (or use a web interface) at https://www.eternal-september.org/ . I post on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk every now and then and get decent conversations. I also posted back in the 90s.

Usenet need not rely on google groups mangling of deja news.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#107

Post by jedberg » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

> It’s clear we ran afoul of the old lesson: don’t build communities for long-lasting FOSS projects on proprietary infrastructure you don’t control. We should not use Discord. So what should we use?

An NNTP server and an IRC server?

I understand that Google Groups was a really nice interface to NNTP, and all the real-time chat apps have better UX than IRC, but it seems like now is a great time to "go back to basics". Maybe IRC and NNTP would get some great client improvements if a bunch of open source groups settled on it?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#108

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

blahblah1234567 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between products that google started and killed and products that google bought and killed.

The former can be a sign of healthy experimentation. The latter is just frustrating, particularly when Google paid a lot for the product in question. Groups at least partly came out of the Dejanews acquisition and seeing something purchased by a company that will be a poor steward is frustrating.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#109

Post by notacoward » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

cbzbc wrote: post #89

spacedcowboy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AtariAge.com[1] - first created in 1988, or 25 years ago. Run by some bloke on the internet. The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at Google... 1: https://atariage.com/about.php

perf-farm ? I think I might know what you mean, but could you unpack?

Not the person who used the term, but I kind of wish I had been. It's excellent. At FAANG-ish companies where "impact" is the key to promotion, there's an inevitable tendency for engineers to prefer working on things that are highly visible like starting new projects or adding new features, vs. things that are highly useful like stability, testing, or code quality. Most internally promoted E6s or above got that way by initiating multiple projects, then dumping them on others when they've served their perf-review-enhancing purpose. "Perf farming" is as good a term as I've seen for it.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#110

Post by scrlk » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:37 PM UTC

cbzbc wrote: post #89

spacedcowboy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AtariAge.com[1] - first created in 1988, or 25 years ago. Run by some bloke on the internet. The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at Google... 1: https://atariage.com/about.php

perf-farm ? I think I might know what you mean, but could you unpack?

I assume it's gaming the Google performance review system in order for promotion. That's why you see new Google products/features launched, then left to wither in the sun - ongoing maintenance/support doesn't do anything for your career.