[jdfellow]

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 you want to go that route), and especially NNTP client readers to be more modern and user-friendly.

[magicalist]

This always comes up in these threads and I always wonder if the commenters ever actually used Usenet.

DejaNews isn't and never was Usenet, it was an archive, and Google Groups was just another Usenet client. Google Groups embrace-extend-extinguished Usenet as much as Gmail embrace-extend-extinguished email, and it got some cachet from having historical posts.

You can still use Usenet as much as you could 20 years ago, and while it was nice a decade or two ago to be able to browse historical threads in google groups, now the Internet Archive has an excellent Usenet archive[1] so we don't have to trust a giant corporation with ADD to hold onto history for us.

[1] https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical

[waynesonfire]

> Gmail embrace-extend-extinguished email

I don't get your point; because google did that to e-mail. By using gmail or their paid product through g-suite, you get to be in the high QoS lane for e-mail delivery and get through their spam filter.

[NelsonMinar]

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 implement anything "on top of Deja", the code base was entirely abandoned, all that was brought over was the archive and maybe some tools for cleaning data.

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

[ttkciar]

> 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!

[haolez]

The problem with USENET is spam. Moderation can be a burden. I suppose Google has some systems in place to mitigate this.

[floren]

At least the last time I looked, Usenet spam was so lazy that it was pretty easy to filter: the exact same ads posted again and again (filter the article title), or schizophrenics posting under the same username 100 times a day (filter the name). Usenet clients made it pretty easy, once you learned the right commands, to instantly shitcan all future messages which matched [sender/title/some string in the body/etc.]

Unfortunately, while it's easy to filter stuff, it means that every newcomer sees the unfiltered crap and has to figure out filtering for themselves.

[Pxtl]

Chat AI is going to make combatting spam 100X harder. Imho we're reaching the end of our ability to allow anonymous contribution to public fora in general.

Which is why I have a conspiracy theory about why conspiracy theorists are against "digital ID".

[bornfreddy]

These days, it should be fairly easy to combat this. Everyone subscribes their messages. Client sw allows whitelisting the signatures. Whitelisted signatures can vouch for new signatures to be added. User can easily silence any signature. Messages that are hidden (because the signature is not whitelisted) are shown if a whitelisted message replies to them.

I'm sure I didn't catch all the edge cases, but the main idea is that the system is distributed, built on reputation, and self-managed. Everyone is responsible for the content they receive.

[mrweasel]

It hasn't really been developed, so it's in the same state that email would have been in, had it too been abandoned.

The big surprise is that NNTP servers are still running, and that there are active newsgroups. With a bit of care I still think NNTP could be a nice base for new localized social networks. Just in the small "town" where I live there are a number of Facebook groups, those could just as easily have been newsgroups.

Usenet currently isn't in a great state, and had it not been for piracy it would have looked even worse.

[sixothree]

I have a theory related to google products - they can only exist if they can capture user data in a manner that is unique compared to their other products.

[squarefoot]

The extinguish step became crystal clear to me after this:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...

As a result, users searching for news, forums and sites with people writing about X, from then on would instead find mostly companies selling that X.

[roerdhh]

There would also be the question how to archive old messages – i.e. one of the main problems Dejanews originally solved for the Usenet community.

[nerdo]

Just like when Google performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against GOPHER.

[eterm]

Huh? Gopher was dead before google existed.