USENET UNGROUPED
I thought I'd write a quick post in recognition, and mostly
celebration, of Google Groups finally discontinuing their
Web-Usenet gateway on the 22nd of Feb. (in whatever time zone they
care about):
https://support.google.com/groups?p=usenet
Their banner warning about the planned discontinuation at the top
of the Google Groups pages now says:
Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or
subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Given how Google's service has been massively, and uncontrollably,
abused by spammers, this is definately for the best. Spam filters
on news servers, or outright rejection of all posts sent from
Google Groups, has made following discussions involving Google
Groups users unreliable. Given Google's complete failure to take
any effective action against the spam floods coming through their
gateway (tens of thousands of spam posts a day in the recent
months), this is the best solution. Those selfishly sticking to
posting via Google Groups even though its operator had clearly
become the least responsible server operator on Usenet, are now
forced to find a real news server. At the same time they might even
find an appreciation of things such as post-wrapping, readable
quoting, threading, and not replying to posts that are thirty years
old. But perhaps that's too much to hope for.
On the down side, this leaves narkive.com as the main web Usenet
archive (posting via it apparantly doesn't work). But it doesn't
have the historical content that Google Groups aquired when they
bought Dejanews, so for now the archives are split between Google
Groups for the best archive of old content, and Narkive for new
posts. That's for so long as Google do keep their archive
accessible, and their website has already become very difficult to
navigate without Javascript. Ironically Google somehow made
searching on Google Groups quite broken years ago too.
It also means that people are probably less likely to stumble onto
and discover Usenet via Google Groups, which is actually how I
first saw it. Although I then set up a news reader in order to send
posts myself, because it was already obvious to me that Google
Groups was a rubbish interface (which has only got worse since).
Yet by allowing so many groups to be flooded with spam, Google
already broke that advantage anyway. Whereas with a news reader you
can use killfiles to remove spam, and many news servers run spam
filters themselves, on Google Groups you were just stuck with it,
so the Google-view of Usenet as walls of drug and gambling ads was
really unrepresentative.
The question is also open as to the purpose of the spam. Most
likely it was for SEO - improving page rankings in Google search
results. If anything that should have given Google more reason to
pay attention, but apparantly not. Hopefully now that Google aren't
putting new posts on the web, there won't be so much incentive for
spammers to switch to tring to post their rubbish via real news
servers.
Overall this whole saga has said a lot about the character of
Google as a company, and something about the general internet
society today as well. Had Usenet not been associated with Google,
you'd imagine people thinking that it would be a good thing for it
to be linked to a major tech company at a time when it's user-base
is disappearing. In reality such influences of the modern internet
have proven poisonous, and it's better off now stuck back in the
same corner of the internet where it started. Yet that still
doesn't bode well for its future.
- The Free Thinker
