[takeda]

IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.

Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft's EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). They acquired DejaNews, renamed it to Google Groups, provided a gateway that allowed everyone to use Usenet. This introduced a lot of spam to the network, but whenever someone reported it, they did nothing. Eventually they introduced their internal groups, and shifted search in a way that it got hard to use Google Groups for searching Usenet posts.

They did similar thing with XMPP (Jabber). When they introduced Google Talk, their service was interconnected with the other XMPP servers. Once it got popular they discontinued it and introduced Hangouts (then later iterations) Hangouts was still connected people could see each other being present people on Hangouts could message anyone, but people on other XMPP couldn't message people on Hangouts. It didn't even show an error. This made many users switch to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.

They attempted to do the same thing with email, but were less successful (since many big companies are also providing the service), this was done through introducing various anti spam measures. You now have to jump through various hoops (SPF, DKIM, RBAC) to have your service still reach Google uses. It didn't matter that I used the same IP and domain for 15 years never had spam sent from it, but suddenly my emails started being silently classified as spam without any warning.

[vageli]

> IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.

> Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft's EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). They acquired DejaNews, renamed it to Google Groups, provided a gateway that allowed everyone to use Usenet. This introduced a lot of spam to the network, but whenever someone reported it, they did nothing. Eventually they introduced their internal groups, and shifted search in a way that it got hard to use Google Groups for searching Usenet posts.

> They did similar thing with XMPP (Jabber). When they introduced Google Talk, their service was interconnected with the other XMPP servers. Once it got popular they discontinued it and introduced Hangouts (then later iterations) Hangouts was still connected people could see each other being present people on Hangouts could message anyone, but people on other XMPP couldn't message people on Hangouts. It didn't even show an error. This made many users switch to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.

The Jabber coopting by Google always felt like something straight out of the old "Embrace, extend, extinguish" playbook of yore.