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Comment by the_biot | Hacker News Reader

> If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.

Usenet was a distributed set of news peering relationships, exchanging posts via NNTP. There was nothing to acquire, so that's not what happened.

Google merely set up a web interface to it, which was eventually extended to the abomination that was Google Groups. This was intended to be some sort of mix of Usenet group and mailing list, all via a web interface. In reality it was awful and I suspect development on it stopped 10+ years ago.

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Google acquired DejaNews, which was a popular web interface for reading Usenet. They rebranded it into Groups at some point.

But what is called Groups now is something else entirely, as you said.

Google Groups still has usenet support, I used it the other day trying to track down the source of an old story.

> The abomination that was Google Groups

FYI, Google Groups are literally the “groups” of Google Workspace — every time you create a group of users to e.g. assign that group some GCP roles, that group then also gets an email address (that being the group’s global primary key), and that email address then implicitly becomes a mailing list all group members are subscribed to.

It’s actually very useful in a corporate Google Workspace context — it’s rare to need an actual mailing list given Slack et al, but they’re effectively “group email-forwarding aliases”, allowing messages to e.g. devops-billing@example.com to arrive in the inboxes of multiple people.

the fact that it's a mailing list is so much better than a plain forwarding alias: it's a searchable/shareable archive for people who joined later. No more asking a coworker to dig through their emails for some important information

Dejanews built that frontend on top of an archive they had. Google bought Dejanews and thus the archive.

Google really destroyed that archive, there's posts from the 80s and 90s I know used to be in deja and in early google that just can't be found any more.

Agreed. I posted a lot in the 90s, especially to groups like sci.math and rec.arts.books.tolkien, and there is almost no trace of any of it in Google groups.

When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.

And it seems that a lot of uuencoded content was removed at some point. You can see the text of the message, but the uuencoded part is mostly cut out. Here's an example: https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/...

If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.

You can't. It was never there.

I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was a high-performance replacement for the community, open source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles in a format for the indexer. It did some light processing, including stripping uuencode content. So uuencode never even made it into the archive.

Thanks for the information. I figured someone here might know something.

The final nail in Usenet's coffin was the removal of the discussion filter from Google searches in 2014. Before that, people could use that filter to easily find others talking about something, but apparently that didn't please advertisers who wanted users to find only companies selling that something, so Google removed that filter and problem solved.

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

https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-sea...

To be honest a lot of what I posted back then I'm happy has been lost to the sands of time.

I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or reason to what's gone and what remains.

The gateway between Google Groups and certain newsgroups is still running, in both directions. For example, I received a copy of this Groups posting https://groups.google.com/g/de.soc.recht.steuern+buchfuehrun... over regular Usenet NNTP.

The technology is still up and running. Some of the people from the 90s are still there. But Usenet definitely has peaked in terms of users and postings.

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