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Google Groups has been left to die

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Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#151

Post by livrem »

ksherlock wrote: post #144
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…

archive.org has some historical usenet dumps. There's no viewer so you need to download them as individual files (generally 1 file per group).

The groups I downloaded from archive.org are all in standard mbox-format and can be searched using mboxgrep. That has been good enough for me when I have wanted to search for something. In the past I often went to google groups, but I never manage to find anything there now it seems.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#153

Post by sn_master »

scottfr wrote: 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…

Also, don't Google emails by default have a 6 months expiry and the Groups is a way to preserve knowledge instead of relying on emails?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#154

Post by mrguyorama »

dalbasal wrote: post #141
mschuster91 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again? Because any kind of social media, especially when it allows binary assets, will be abused by CSAM and piracy spreaders, by Holocaust deniers, by scammers, by spammers shilling dick enlargement pills, questionably "legal" drugs, questionable dietary supplements or all kinds of other stuff, by trolls bullying people right up to suicide "for the lulz", o…

I don't agree. First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety…

Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to ban the offices of American politicians and political contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM WIKIPEDIA

It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#155

Post by bee_rider »

zikduruqe wrote: post #86
pdxandi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note that 1988 was, gulp, 35 years ago.

Just a note, Star Wars was released closer to World War 2, than today's date. Makes you feel really old.

1977-1945=32 2023-1977=46 2023-32=1991

Quite a bit closer!

That’s an interesting note, given that the Tie/X-wing fights were heavily inspired by WW2 dogfights, right? Can you imagine something that draws on the Gulf War similarly? It just seems wrong, too proximate to pull out purely aesthetic themes.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#156

Post by zamnos »

chx wrote: post #135
bpye wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google Groups is actually going to die would it not be worth scraping the history for at least some groups?

It would be so much nicer if someone from Google -- we know they are reading this forum could release the archive to Archive.org. Google doesn't do much with it, they removed Advanced Search so... why not?

It's due to legal challenges, unfortunately, and as Manu Cornet's org chart depicts[1], this means that there just isn't the resources at Google to deal with it, nor is there the insurgent counter-culture to release it via torrent on 4chan.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#157

Post by eklitzke »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #68
nightpool wrote: post #33

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

I don't think it is necessarily a "problem" that it can't be perf-farmed anymore though. Google groups isn't perfect but it does a lot of things well (the bugs mentioned in TFA not withstanding), is used extensively internally at Google, and doesn't necessarily need a lot of new features. There are a ton of internal products at Google that are also staffed by one or two people in maintenance mode and it's not a problem.

As an example, I recently checked the internal symbolization service at Google (that handles symbolization for C++ executables, which is in turn used for generating performance profiles and symbolizing things like stack traces generated by core dumps) and the team maintaining it was two people. And those people aren't solely maintaining the symbolization service, they're compiler engineers who spend most of their time working on other projects and spend a small amount of their time maintaining the symbolization service as issues come up or bugs are reported. But this isn't a problem. The symbolization service works and is basically feature complete. There's no reason to have a team of ten people actively working on it.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#159

Post by chris_wot »

dalbasal wrote: post #141
mschuster91 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again? Because any kind of social media, especially when it allows binary assets, will be abused by CSAM and piracy spreaders, by Holocaust deniers, by scammers, by spammers shilling dick enlargement pills, questionably "legal" drugs, questionable dietary supplements or all kinds of other stuff, by trolls bullying people right up to suicide "for the lulz", o…

I don't agree. First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety…

Dear god, you can’t use Wikipedia. The abusive moderation is incredible on that site. Not a project I’d ever recommend contributing to!

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#160

Post by livrem »

LegitShady wrote: post #38
nightpool wrote: post #33

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…

nerd argument and fanfiction site spacebattles.com https://forums.spacebattles.com/history/ I'm sure there are lots of niche sites that have lasted as long. Thats just off the top of my head.

I still visit some web forums that has been online since the 90's. At least two still use the same ancient software that they have used since ~1995. One of those is shut down a few hours every night (US time) for "database maintenance". I find that more adorable than annoying.

Used to hate web-forums. Usability is so bad compared to USENET. But now they are goldmines of probably unique content, and far better than Discord or Facebook Groups.

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