Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Groups has been left to die

ahelwer.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 307 posts

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#271

Post by BlueTemplar »

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?

Yeah, considering Antifa has a (pre)history of Stalinism and alliances of convenience with Nazis, I don't see what is there to be proud of ?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#272

Post by [deleted] »

sn_master wrote: post #265
guiambros wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By default there's no Gmail expiration (that I know of). Deleted messages are kept in the Trash folder for 30 days and then permanently deleted, but archived emails exist forever (provided you still have space left).

I was talking about the Google internal Gmail, not the public Gmail. I am sure that one has a default expiry for normal emails at least. Did you try checking your inbox for anything > 6 months old?

[deleted]

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#273

Post by BlueTemplar »

capableweb wrote: post #5
cauthon wrote: post #3

I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.

Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software) principles.

While there are still forums using old software, and more importantly, not moderated, which are overrun by spam, surely this isn't the case for those that keep up ?

(I'm also wondering how much field-specific registration questions help there, and what are the non-GAFAM alternatives to Captcha ?)

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#274

Post by TylerE »

bitL wrote: post #220
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…

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#275

Post by wyclif »

evouga wrote: post #269
bbarn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but people continue to evolve the way they have (no pun intended) discourse. Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications. I haven't had a personal email in over a year I'd guess. People text, they whatsapp, they messenger, they telegram, but no one emails. The same…

“no one emails”: that hasn’t been my experience or observation at all. Email remains by far the most common channel for professional communication. Sure, my coworkers will send me Slack DMs. Random professional acquaintances do not.

To me, email is still the killer app. It upsets me that it is losing its power as an open protocol as corporations try to cannibalize it.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#276

Post by thrashh »

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…

Honestly usually a forum dies because the community itself died first and no one cares about the thing anymore.

Google Groups may have lasted this long but as far as I’m concerned, it already died long ago and there was no reason to even go to it anymore.

There are still forums that out there that have survived two decades or more because their community is still alive. And keeping a community alive is not a technical matter.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#277

Post by spacechild1 »

bbarn wrote: post #221
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…

Not only that, but people continue to evolve the way they have (no pun intended) discourse. Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications. I haven't had a personal email in over a year I'd guess. People text, they whatsapp, they messenger, they telegram, but no one emails. The same…

> Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications.

Be careful with extrapolating from you personal experience. Pretty much all of my professional communication happens over e-mail. (I wouldn't even know what to use instead.) I am sure that is still true for many people.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#278

Post by zamnos »

mrobins wrote: post #177
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…

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 about it" (which, tbc, I am.)

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#279

Post by barrysteve »

Pxtl wrote: post #187
barrysteve wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous boards will probably stick around but become near worthless and be superficially filled with colourful low effort posts. None of us are anonymous to the three letter agencies, isps and web services without layers of extra protection. The idea that humility is hiding but also that we all must be watched to keep us from screwing up, will continue as normal in the US. I would suggest that the old rationalist v…

Right. I'm not saying that real identity should be mandatory throughout the internet, but that providers should be able to confirm real identity before allowing people to contribute content to their boards. For reference, I'm rate-limited here on Hacker News because I'm politically opinionated and don't shy away from angry arguments. Would this be a better site if I went and created a new account every time Dang got…

Well your rate-limit comment raises an interesting point. My thought is that if you allowed back-and-forth conversations on public forums the comment sections would become uncomfortably long to get through, which already is kind of a doom-scrolling problem anyway.

Maybe public forums could hold the form of introductory areas that cause new conversations and relationships to shoot off into their own bubbles.

I'm an non-US empirical republican so most of my political views are bland to discuss in an American context. I do believe that more discussion builds better structures and reveals better ideas.

With human moderation, text input that carries meaning to the conversation can be allowed, regardless of it's machine-or-human source. In the big-picture sense, all information is generated by humans, so someone using ChatGPT to parrot old data into hackernews doesn't necessarily spell doom unless it's meaningless spam, like you say.

If we gave up "all" control of our computers an external web authority, you could validate if the user had copy&pasted from ChatGPT. But since we're in this odd middle-area of desiring no oversight on the PC, and high quality filtering on the web service, then you need humans to do the work of interpreting....

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#280

Post by selfhoster11 »

jedberg wrote: post #107

> It’s clear we ran afoul of the old lesson: don’t build communities for long-lasting FOSS projects on proprietary infrastructure you don’t control. We should not use Discord. So what should we use? An NNTP server and an IRC server? I understand that Google Groups was a really nice interface to NNTP, and all the real-time chat apps have better UX than IRC, but it seems like now is a great time to "go back to basics".…

I'm a huge fan of decentralisation, but I am 100% not going back to IRC. I want the modern features too. Matrix seems to cover this.
Post reply on HN