[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.

[mynameisvlad]

Google Suite and Gmail are not the only ways to get through spam filters, and since when has latency been an issue? Do you know what "extinguish" means? Because that does not sound like "extinguish" and only barely scratches the surface of "extend".

If anything, Gmail's spam filters are absolute shit, judging by all the random spam that blasts through. It's a colander at this point.

[syntheticnature]

Ironically, in recent experience I've found Google Groups email routed to spam in Gmail, even with a Gmail-based sender and recipient.

[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.

[pwg]

The vast bulk of USENET spam is arriving /from/ google groups.

A very effective spam filter is to simply killfile anything with an @google.groups message id.

Sadly, that also killfiles the few real posters who use GG, so if one wants to continue to see them, one has to add them as overrides to the general "kill GG" filter.

[pasc1878]

Add to the fun GFoogle Groups have stopped carrying some groups because they had too much spam. As others noted much of it was coming from google groups itself, if only it had the spam filters other usenet providers had.

[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".

[mschuster91]

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

Even if you're not a tinfoil hat wearer, "digital ID" projects are fraught with issues:

- private ones can instantly and permanently revoke your access for whatever reason they believe. Facebook, Google and Twitter have shown that often enough. Or they can go out of business like many OpenID providers which is even worse - you can, given enough resources, even hold Internet giants accountable, but it's impossible to resurrect a shuttered service once they delete their keyrings. Or they can use information about which services you use to push even more detailed ads.

- public (i.e. government-run) ones... you don't want your government to know which porn you watch, you don't want the government to be able to know what you're writing on Reddit, and you don't want the government to be able to take away your access to your (digital) assets on a whim like the Canadian government did by freezing the bank accounts of COVID deniers (note: I support actions against COVID deniers, but that's going way more than a few steps too far).

[justeleblanc]

I quite frankly don't care if the government knows what porn I watch. I'm really tired of this puritanical-inspired take on privacy. Always the same examples.

Freezing assets is completely different, but I don't see how that's relevant in the context. You're just waving the vague feeling that government is this evil omnipotent being.

[mschuster91]

> I quite frankly don't care if the government knows what porn I watch. I'm really tired of this puritanical-inspired take on privacy.

The thing is, invasive acts against civic freedoms tend to be started going against sex workers or be justified with sexuality/morals. Just look at Florida and the book bans or how sex work is criminalized in a lot of countries, including wide parts of the US. Why should I trust a government with my porn when it deems it necessary to determine under which conditions two adults can have consensual sex?

> Freezing assets is completely different, but I don't see how that's relevant in the context. You're just waving the vague feeling that government is this evil omnipotent being.

I'm German. My ancestors abused innoucuous data registers to have precise lists on who was to be transported off to gas chambers, less than a hundred years ago. I live less than 20km from the KZ Dachau, where the Nazis murdered tens of thousands of people. That gives a pretty harsh view on just how evil governments can become if citizens do not care.

[jrapdx3]

Many years ago I visited Dachau, truly an eye-opening experience. I'm certain many Germans did care what was happening but they were quickly silenced or intimidated, ultimately powerless to stop the horrific actions of the government. I do agree that governments do not always act in the interests of citizens. Often enough there's little basis for trusting officials or the bureaucracies that rule everywhere.

[Pxtl]

Emergencies Act was 100% necessary because the Canadian gov't does not have access to the kind of internal forces that the US does. They have to rely on municipal and provincial police forces who'd shown total disinterest in doing their jobs. The inquiry found that.

And the existence of digital ID doesn't mean it's mandatory for systems to use it. Why would a porn site want to authenticate their users against digital ID? And if some porn sites don't, why would anybody patronize one that did?

What matters is that the option needs to be there - people running a service need to be able to say "I want to be able to know which of my users are real humans, and to be able to revoke said humans permanently if necessary".

[mschuster91]

> They have to rely on municipal and provincial police forces who'd shown total disinterest in doing their jobs. The inquiry found that.

Well, the solution is to take over municipal and provincial police forces and make sure they do their jobs. The solution is not to freeze people's bank accounts.

> Why would a porn site want to authenticate their users against digital ID? And if some porn sites don't, why would anybody patronize one that did?

Because this is the situation in Germany and IIRC also the UK. (Guess the number of German porn sites Germans use - next to none)

> What matters is that the option needs to be there - people running a service need to be able to say "I want to be able to know which of my users are real humans, and to be able to revoke said humans permanently if necessary".

It's precisely the other way around. People should demand they can use any legal service anonymously, and it should be the default option to keep as much of a service anonymously usable - in fact, this is one of the core principles of the GDPR, to minimize the data anyone has.

[Pxtl]

To consume? Yes, I agree that should be anonymous. But to contribute? It's ridiculous to demand that a provider be willing to host your content, even simple comments, without knowing who you are.

> Well, the solution is to take over municipal and provincial police forces and make sure they do their jobs

Uh, I suspect you had a different opinion about how the government should keep law enforcement at arm's length when it was about the Attorney General.

[barrysteve]

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 view that privacy is in anonymity would be changed to privacy existing for the unknown citizen, the internet user that is off-the-map or leaves no trace. Popular VPNs already have started this journey by obscuring your country's location.

[Pxtl]

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 annoyed with me?

Otherwise any open text entry box will get flooded by AIs that are completely indistinguishable from human content. Basically the existing problems with troll-farms and spam-bots and hackers will get magnified order of magnitude. Repeatedly, as the tech becomes better and cheaper.

[barrysteve]

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....

[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.

[giantrobot]

That's just bozo filters with a side of Web of Trust. It's been done. Bozo filters help with spam on the client side but don't do anything about spam on the server side. Servers still have to host everything because they can't know a priori what clients will want or not.

Not that your idea is necessarily bad but it breaks a lot of the utility of Usenet to have whitelist based filtering. I can't know ahead of time I like your posts and want to whitelist you. I also don't want to have to "know a guy" to get involved in a group (via Web of Trust).

[bornfreddy]

Is spam message a problem if noone reads it? Storage is cheap.

As for knowing a guy... Maybe someone will browse spam and vouch for you for this message and if more people like it, you are accepted to their whitelists. But to be honest, if people don't want to read my messages, that is their prerogative.

[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.

[cp9]

next people are going to say google ruined the stone tablet by inventing paper.

google has done a lot of stuff I don't agree with, we don't need to make stuff up!