Part of the background for this is that over the past month or more, Usenet has been under an unprecedented spam attack from Google Groups that Google isn't doing anything about. People have resorted to filtering everything coming from Google Groups, with a white list, and there are voices calling for de-peering of Google Groups from the Usenet federation.
And it is also /interesting/ that the evil one's [1] blog post mentions "and spam" as a reason for this, but fully fails to mention that 99.8% of the "spam" flood is coming from their own system.
Sounds like the barbarians are sacking Rome. What happened to mighty Google's thirst for blood and will to dominate the Internet? It feels like they've just started accepting being helpless to stop all this spam.
Google has now an CEO who is outsourcing everything to cut costs.
Google already had a quality problems before due to culture of zero support and dropping projects after their managers' got promoted, but now they have a problem with keeping up to any standards.
That's how it works when you offshore everything - where the main criteria is price and nobody cares about quality at all. They could offshore to mid cost countries, but they offshore to cheapest bidders.
Well, Alphabet has had falling profit margins for sometime. I thought their reorg was stupid since the company’s profits all came from ads on Google’s web services. Rather than reorg, I would have just canceled the unprofitable bits.
As for sending stuff offshore, they should seriously rid themselves of this products/services instead. They need to cut costs, headcount, and company complexity. They need to focus on their core product before they die: search and ads.
It doesn't matter how much money USENET makes one company, what matters is what it represents. Surrendering USENET entirely to abuse means we're losing one of the last vestiges of the ARPANET. It brings great shame and dishonor that Google won't fight for it.
As the song goes, "We haven't seen that spirit here since 1969." Okay, so maybe it's more like 1989, a few years before Eternal September[1] in 1993, when the deluge started for real.
But, I'll tell you what we're not losing when Google drops support for USENET: the archives. And, IMO, that's where the real value in Google Groups[2] lies, and has for decades.
Yes. Go to `groups.google.com`, switch "My Groups" to "All groups of messages" and type in the name of your favorite newsgroup in the search field. You should see links to newsgroups pop up. The archives are contained at those links. You can search them reasonably well, but browsing them is tough, because of the 2 decades worth of spam that's accumulated in them.
Just get a news reader and pay money for a usenet provider. (They cost money because 99.99% of usenet traffic is pirated movies and providers know that and optimize for that bandwidth-heavy use case)
And hope the provider actually carries text groups and not only pirate movie groups.
I'm certainly not losing anything. Only people who need Google services to access Usenet are losing. And I make no apology for being elitist here - some clubs are better when they are mostly frequented by the elite.
