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Google Groups has been left to die

ahelwer.ca

111–120 of 307 posts

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#111

Google Groups has survived 22 years. How many self-hosted Discourse forums can say the same? If you're working on a new, small side-project like a new formal evaluator, are you going to want to spend your limited administrative bandwidth onboarding new contributors, responding to feature suggestions, talking to users, etc, or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and fig…

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

Ahem, typo? Site says it was created in 1998. Which coincidentally was 25 years ago...

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only used discourse in a limited way but it lacks the searchability of the old forums. I can't imagine how much useful information has been lost when some of these sites have shut down. Discussions on a well run forum would be on topic with various people adding to a conversaion, discussions on a single topic seems to get lost on these chat apps

>Only used discourse in a limited way but it lacks the searchability of the old forums. Are you saying that discourse lacks search features , or that most discourse forums don't have the "history" that old forums do?

Not OP, but I struggle with Discourse search, both in terms of usability (not quite good) and presentation - both D. itself and it's search is made by someone who doesn't need to exchange information and persist it. After some attempts I just fallback to external search with 'site:domain.tld search term'.

Wasting 90% of my screen real estate while actually hiding useful information isn't helping too.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#113
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat AI is going to make combatting spam 100X harder. Imho we're reaching the end of our ability to allow anonymous contribution to public fora in general. Which is why I have a conspiracy theory about why conspiracy theorists are against "digital ID".

> Which is why I have a conspiracy theory about why conspiracy theorists are against "digital ID". Even if you're not a tinfoil hat wearer, "digital ID" projects are fraught with issues: - private ones can instantly and permanently revoke your access for whatever reason they believe . Facebook, Google and Twitter have shown that often enough. Or they can go out of business like many OpenID providers which is even wor…

I quite frankly don't care if the government knows what porn I watch. I'm really tired of this puritanical-inspired take on privacy. Always the same examples.

Freezing assets is completely different, but I don't see how that's relevant in the context. You're just waving the vague feeling that government is this evil omnipotent being.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#115
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> Most internally promoted E6s or above got that way by initiating multiple projects, then dumping them on others

Well, Jeff and Sanjay got to DE/Fellows this way, so this is a good role model. Unfortunately doesn’t scale.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#116
post #44

Google Groups is heavily used within Google's ecosystem. Specifically it is: - a system for managing group-based access for Google Workspace users, e.g. share a Google Doc with a group to give all members access - a system for managing group-based access to Google Cloud Platform resources, e.g. share a BigQuery table with a Google Group to give all group members access to it. - a simple way for Google Workspace users…

Simple shared email addresses maybe, but Groups is far from "Shared Gmail" when it comes to even basic features like tagging and archiving.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#117
post #91
post #44

Google Groups is heavily used within Google's ecosystem. Specifically it is: - a system for managing group-based access for Google Workspace users, e.g. share a Google Doc with a group to give all members access - a system for managing group-based access to Google Cloud Platform resources, e.g. share a BigQuery table with a Google Group to give all group members access to it. - a simple way for Google Workspace users…

Is that not "Google Groups for Workspaces" vs the newsgroups style public Google Groups this article is talking about?

It's the same thing...

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#118
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat AI is going to make combatting spam 100X harder. Imho we're reaching the end of our ability to allow anonymous contribution to public fora in general. Which is why I have a conspiracy theory about why conspiracy theorists are against "digital ID".

> Which is why I have a conspiracy theory about why conspiracy theorists are against "digital ID". Even if you're not a tinfoil hat wearer, "digital ID" projects are fraught with issues: - private ones can instantly and permanently revoke your access for whatever reason they believe . Facebook, Google and Twitter have shown that often enough. Or they can go out of business like many OpenID providers which is even wor…

Emergencies Act was 100% necessary because the Canadian gov't does not have access to the kind of internal forces that the US does. They have to rely on municipal and provincial police forces who'd shown total disinterest in doing their jobs. The inquiry found that.

And the existence of digital ID doesn't mean it's mandatory for systems to use it. Why would a porn site want to authenticate their users against digital ID? And if some porn sites don't, why would anybody patronize one that did?

What matters is that the option needs to be there - people running a service need to be able to say "I want to be able to know which of my users are real humans, and to be able to revoke said humans permanently if necessary".

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#120
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…

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