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Google Groups has been left to die

ahelwer.ca

191–200 of 307 posts

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980? Domestic terrorism has always been the wheelhouse of the left for the USA. It's only very recently the right has been getting involved and still has a long way to go to get close. Once we start getting monthly bombings we can call it "even" and then push it father to get to "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing" what revisionist history. Peopl…

> Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980?

If you have to dig back half a century to make your point about contemporary events, you have effectively ceded the point.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#192
post #8

Google Groups performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against USENET, by way of their acquisition of DejaNews and then implementing their own forum/mailing list interface on top if it. But, I wonder how many communities that are using Google Groups would be suitably served by falling back to USENET. I suppose it would require some updates to both NNTP server software to be easier to administer (if yo…

That's a historically inaccurate view. Usenet was well on its way to cultural irrelevance long before Google bought DejaNews. Google bought Deja to rescue it, it was literally days from failing entirely and was a huge scramble to bring their archive online at Google. There was no grand strategy to bootstrap Deja into a forum product, Google had no strategy at all for forum / social media in that era. Google didn't im…

> Proposing "fall back to Usenet" in 2023 makes about as much sense as "folks who use Slack should just use IRC".

Hey! :-( IRC is still alive and kicking, thank you very much!

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#193
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have to rely on municipal and provincial police forces who'd shown total disinterest in doing their jobs. The inquiry found that. Well, the solution is to take over municipal and provincial police forces and make sure they do their jobs. The solution is not to freeze people's bank accounts. > Why would a porn site want to authenticate their users against digital ID? And if some porn sites don't, why would anyb…

To consume ? Yes, I agree that should be anonymous. But to contribute? It's ridiculous to demand that a provider be willing to host your content, even simple comments, without knowing who you are. > Well, the solution is to take over municipal and provincial police forces and make sure they do their jobs Uh, I suspect you had a different opinion about how the government should keep law enforcement at arm's length whe…

> To consume? Yes, I agree that should be anonymous. But to contribute? It's ridiculous to demand that a provider be willing to host your content, even simple comments, without knowing who you are.

That is precisely why virtually all countries have privileges for services hosting user-generated content on the Internet.

Unfortunately, both wide parts on the right and less wide but still significant parts of the left want to cut that privilege in the US, and that is Just Not Good At All.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#195
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first created in 1988, or 25 years ago 1988 was 35 years ago. I know, hard to believe... want to know something even more shocking?? People who are today 18 years old were born in 2005!

It's hard for even me to believe that I'll be turning 18 in a few months. All the responsibilities...

> I'll be turning 18 in a few months. All the responsibilities [..]

(sorry!)

... but, like most soon-to-be-18-year-olds, you have no idea![0]

18 is nothing, but do try and enjoy it while you can :)

[0] just like me, way back when...

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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".

Some twat in Berkeley swatted blindly at a vaguely sympathetic individual with a bike lock, and combined with the perception of a condescending attitude towards rural Americans, I guess that means the non-entity “antifa” has forfeit some moral high ground to push back on the multi-million collection of assault weapons right-wing militias wield with little to no formal training and at best a tenuous grasp on American history and/or objective reality, or the never ending smorgasbord of violence and trauma it causes.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#197
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…

While I also lament what Google Groups has become, let's not rewrite history. By 2001, Dejanews had rebranded as a shopping comparison site, ran out of money, and was on the verge of shutting down. I don't remember many people being upset about Google stepping in to save the archive. And, in the early days, the signs were positive. Google actually cared about it at that point, and still had a good reputation. They ex…

Google of 2001 is not the Google of 2023. If anything its the exact opposite.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#198

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…

> Google Groups has survived 22 years [..]

Well that prompted me to check, and it seems my primary domain name, and hence my email address[es], turn 23 years old this year!

Hat tip to the person who prompted me - waaay back in 2000 - to register it.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#199
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…

App beta distribution on Play.

Also this is just the external user facing side. Internally Google Groups are used extensively for all sorts of things.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#200

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

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 probl…

> the team maintaining it was two people. [...] But this isn't a problem. The symbolization service works and is basically feature complete.

As long as it works, it is no problem. But given any larger change somewhere in the stack and management not being aware that these two folks have that side project, maybe they even left, and there will be problems.

Either a project has dedicated staff or it doesn't exist and just survives.

I don't know how critical groups internally are, but I assume with the general decline of e-mail compared to chat, video calls, etc. (insert joke about googles chat tools if you like ...) I would assume that this will be home less of relevance. Over time as well and drop more and more off.

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