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

What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 19 posts

What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#1

Post by legohorizons »

hey everyone, been thinking a lot about where all the good convos are happening these days. like, im pretty young and grew up on reddit/twitter for programming stuff, but now im tryna do more serious work and cant find the right spots for it??

watched that node documentary recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB8KwiiUGy0) and was surprised to see familiar faces like @Rauch on early node google groups. now twitter is just ai and teens and getting annoying.

saw this article about mailing lists (https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/) and got me thinking. seems like all the good ideas are stuck in these walled gardens now - mastodon, twitter, github discussions, farcaster channels, etc. not only is it politically siloed, but places like discord/slack are just totally underindexed.

what happened to google groups? do ppl miss it? are there any real open alternatives? whos working on this stuff?

where's the serious, nuanced work happening in 2024 and beyond? explain whats going on to someone to young to be born into what seemed like a more vibrant era of google groups and usenet.

google groups seems to have turned into some admin tool for GCP rather than a place for real discussions. anyone else feeling this or am i just being nostalgic for something i never even experienced lol

thoughts? experiences? where do you all go for the good stuff these days?

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#3

Post by legohorizons »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Try subject-specific forums like dpreviews.com, polyamory.com, coderanch.com, etc. Think about Quora but with 98% less enshittification.

Thats a good tip. I guess the question that brings up is solving the problem of discovering those communities that are still alive and thriving out there.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#4

Post by PaulHoule »

legohorizons wrote: post #3
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Try subject-specific forums like dpreviews.com, polyamory.com, coderanch.com, etc. Think about Quora but with 98% less enshittification.

Thats a good tip. I guess the question that brings up is solving the problem of discovering those communities that are still alive and thriving out there.

A friend of mine and I have been talking about ways to consolidate and improve online commenting. If you look up my profile and contact me about it I'd be glad to talk about it.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#5

Post by scottedwards »

I feel your pain. I was lucky enough to be around to enjoy the days when the ONLY place online where people were discussing serious topics (and non-serious ones!) was USENET (and maybe The Well). Google Groups just started to throw a web interface on USENET.

Sadly, once big money entered the Web in the late 90's, every Portal popping up felt like they had to include discussions/message boards into their features.

Yahoo Groups was big in the day and is now essentially dead. Same with Facebook, etc.

Now everything is very fragmented. There are some really great discussions happening out there (metafilter.net is a good example) but they are hard to find.

Reddit might be the closest thing to a groups/USENET replacement that we have.

I'd love to hear about anything else out there that may save civil discourse, but I have my doubts it exists (or will). (although web3 may save us yet - nostr is pretty interesting)

After all, what does it mean when 90% of people spend their time on Instagram and Tiktok?

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#6

Post by scottedwards »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4
legohorizons wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a good tip. I guess the question that brings up is solving the problem of discovering those communities that are still alive and thriving out there.

A friend of mine and I have been talking about ways to consolidate and improve online commenting. If you look up my profile and contact me about it I'd be glad to talk about it.

care to share anything here? I think many would be interested. Maybe just a link to something?

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#7

Post by al_borland »

When I was in college it was all about forums. I belonged to many, and it was my favorite era of the internet. There were people I talked to everyday for a decade, and formed many real life friendships as a result.

Facebook and Reddit really killed forums. Some our still around, but most are a shell of what they once were. The ones I was really involved in all shutdown after members started to spend more and more time on Facebook.

HN is really my only outlet anymore. I was on Digg until v4, then spent many years on Reddit, but it never had a sense of actual community. Reddit also became intolerable quite a while ago; I haven’t been there in a couple years.

It feels a bit sad to say, but the collapse of forums left a hole in my life and I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to find someone to fill it.

Sorry I don’t have many helpful suggestions, but I can tell you you’re not alone. I think the formation of these mega sites really hurt the internet. When sites reach a certain size the individual disappears and users all blend together.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#8

Post by davkan »

al_borland wrote: post #7

When I was in college it was all about forums. I belonged to many, and it was my favorite era of the internet. There were people I talked to everyday for a decade, and formed many real life friendships as a result. Facebook and Reddit really killed forums. Some our still around, but most are a shell of what they once were. The ones I was really involved in all shutdown after members started to spend more and more tim…

I joined a car forum a couple years ago and it was like a blast from the past. An actual community on the internet. People acting with respect generally, active and reasonable moderation, full control of the platform. Users coming together for a shared interest and knowledge but also just a hangout for like minded people to socialize. Plenty of people meeting up in real life, well known members who passed memorialized and getting long threads of how peoples lives were touched.

It really just made me remember what the internet used to be. Reddit (or any modern site) has almost none of that. The only sub of mine I can think of that remotely had a vibe of a community of people, not just users, was r/eve and that’s only because it’s a small portal into an existing insular community of 20 years.

Niche and hyper specific hobby forums that serve as wealths of information like car model forums seem to be doing ok and absolutely dwarf their Reddit sub counterparts in volume of posts. It could be due to internet searches driving users with narrow search parameters towards the wealth of old content in those forums that Reddit could not hope to surpass? But we’re not getting any new forums of that type. New niches get subreddits and any sub that grows out of complete obscurity will be subsumed into the larger Reddit culture and lose its uniqueness and community.

Post reply on HN