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Google Groups has been left to die

ahelwer.ca

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Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#281

Post by arichard123 »

ryanwhitney wrote: post #169
zamnos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> High bus factor

You mean "he might get hit by a bus"? Surely businesses die more easily than people. Isn't a "high bus factor" kind of a good thing in this situation?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#282

Post by redeeman »

zamnos wrote: post #278
mrobins wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, a good _independent_ product with an active user base and a profitable model has a better than average chance of surviving (bus factor aside). Should the creator want to move on, someone should find the revenue stream attractive for some (even small) amount of money. I’d bet on baseline profitability to keep something alive over an outsized dream of future growth or potential synergies almost every time.

My problem is that the bus factor can't be put aside when it's such a small number, and that pile of "should"s add up to just as much, if not more, uncertainty, compared to Google letting groups living on in a half zombified state essentially forever. At the very least, you have to admit that once you put some thought into it, it's not as cut and dried as "boo hoo Google killed off Reader in 2011 and I'm still salty…

google kinda has a track record here

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#283

Post by corobo »

sli wrote: post #250
corobo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My account at gtaforums.com turned 20 this year, cripes. Site itself looks to be 21 years old. SomethingAwful has been around longer I'm pretty sure too.

Albino Balcksheep turned 24 this past January and is still going. Newgrounds will turn 28 this July. Feels like yesterday, still.

Right! I remember clearly when I registered on GTAF too. I'd discovered a bug/trick that allowed you to store a helicopter in a garage (I want to say in GTA 3?) and was itching to tell someone about it.

Of course it was already a known thing on the internet, but that was the start of my online career. From there I ended up on IRC and in there I wanted to make a bot, so I learned mIRCScript.

Spin on a couple years and I was helping run the IRC network, which got me into sysadmin stuff. From that rattling off how email works got me my first real tech job. "How in-depth do you want me to go?" "Uhh.. as far as you can"

I got the job offer before I'd finished with the DNS lookups haha.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#284

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #213
trvz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1]. This isn't quite the brag you think it is. 10 years in, a product like this should be mostly fleshed out. On the linked page, I'm seeing design as well as technical changes mentioned. Also, they apparently only started working on translations recently.

Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. Once you accept that, your perspective on 10 years may change. It's a long time. I challenge anyone to find discussions of this type from 100 years ago. Even if it was recorded (unlikely), did it survive after all of the participants died (unlikely)? Yes, we have 100 year old newspapers, but 100 year old discussions about underwater knitting.

Scientific journals were basically the mailing lists of their time, especially when they first started. You can easily find journals from 100s of years ago.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#285

Post by westurner »

vl wrote: post #115
notacoward wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you get promoted, they tend to move you to different projects (that need different resources at founding time than the operations folks that have experience scaling up)

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#288

Post by BeFlatXIII »

kerpotgh wrote: post #127
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…

Because freedom is moderation. A place without moderation turns into a spam, gore, cp, racist, sexist shithole where no discourse happens. You may be nostalgic for usenets groups but that was a different time when a very small slice of society used those.

Perhaps the problem was bringing all of society online.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#289

Post by tracker1 »

Usenet/NNTP is the way... Although most text/discussion groups are long dead, I think it's still a good idea in general. The move away from this towards email lists and Google Groups in the first place is/was IMO problematic. Much like moves away from IRC.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#290

Post by tracker1 »

TylerE wrote: post #274
bitL wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Groups basically destroyed all Usenet competitors and now is going belly up itself, likely taking down a large portion of computing history with itself.

The warezers killed usenet. They made it completely uneconomical for ISPs to run server.

Usenet was generally pretty good at sticking to binaries for the warez and copyright content. Hosting the text-only groups was not that intensive, especially by today's standards. I think the worst problem was sites that just didn't care... I spent a day reporting spam posts to the admins of origin servers, and they just didn't care at all.

Today, it's far less of an issue.. but if Usenet got popular again, the spammers would get back into it. I can only imagine how much spam gets removed/filtered on this site.

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