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Google Groups has been left to die

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Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#161

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff.

Islamist content gets rigorously moderated on all networks you mention, for years now. The far-right was similarly acted against, but at least in the case of Twitter Musk reversed a lot of their bans, with the expected result of people spreading Nazi vocabulary or Holocaust denialism right afterwards.

> 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 Most of Wikipedia's moderation is done by unpaid volunteers, sans legal issues which are handled by WMF via executive actions. They run a dead simple tech stack, with most being served out of highly optimized caches.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#163

Post by Scoundreller »

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…

Arstechnica forums have been going on since 98 or so. But they had that Conde Nast money early on.

What drives me bonkers is when newspapers just wipe out their historical comments sections. Like… archiving people’s thoughts is supposed to be what you do!

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#164

Post by drstewart »

mschuster91 wrote: post #95
dalbasal wrote: post #60

Looking back, it's quite surprising how stagnant, in some sense, the social media space has become. How centralised and how... lame. The big hitters really did pillage and burn. Now, between moderation norms becoming increasingly sensitive and the hard turn the web took away from open... It's hard to see any new form take off. That said, perhaps that means it's a perfect time. Groups/Usenet has its limitations. Featu…

> 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…

>You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa".

Yeah, I wonder why you're only concerned about right wing trolling - left wing abuse is a-okay with you?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#166

Post by coliveira »

bee_rider wrote: post #155
zikduruqe wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WW2 had an immense importance in the minds of people who lived it. Gulf War... who even cares about it, except for the ones involved? Many people don't even remember that.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#167

Post by zamnos »

mrguyorama wrote: post #154
dalbasal wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment, you can just click the edit button and add stuff.

Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not even a user account required for most. There are those that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#169

Post by ryanwhitney »

zamnos wrote: post #148
ryanwhitney wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo! Groups lasted 19 years. I co-admin a large group that had to find a new home when it was killed off. We went to a third party (groups.io) that accepts money in exchange for services. Will that have longevity? No idea, but it's at least preferable to trusting [insert big tech co]'s benevolence in keeping a service (that they seemingly don't care about) running.

Money is but one piece to ensure longevity. How many people even work at groups.io? What's their business continuity plans in case the founder or someone critical to the team dies, either due to old age or some sort of tragedy? Or becomes tired of running it? I'm not convinced it's preferable - people get old and tired of running a thing, or undergo some big life event that changes their priorities, and it's so tires…

Groups.io was founded by Mark Fletcher[0], who in '97 started the mailing list service that Yahoo! eventually bought and turned into their Groups product. They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1]. Nonetheless, they're small and one might guess there's a high bus factor here. (Sorry Mark!)

I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of Google Groups being internally significant until this thread, but they've burned enough similar products that it was barely a consideration for me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman)

[1] https://groups.io/g/updates/topics

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#170

Post by mschuster91 »

drstewart wrote: post #164
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…

>You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa". Yeah, I wonder why you're only concerned about right wing trolling - left wing abuse is a-okay with you?

Do tell, where exactly is the left engaged in hate speech campaigns that come even close to the amount of abuse from the right wing? Not to mention domestic terrorism?

Both in the US and Germany, the answer is "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing".

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