RIP Google Groups Dejanews.com Archive?
dejanews.com
dejanews.com
Most of what I know about online knife-fight arguing came from Usenet.
I remember seeing this guide decades ago, but I can't say I participated in the social scene it documents: https://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/
What I find now is that there is less community. Even "social networks" like TikTok aren't really social, in that nobody is doing much socializing. We're all just throwing out witty little comments and leaving.
My theory is that it has to do with the ubiquity of feedback mechanisms. Likes, followers, upvotes, etc. It's a never-ending popularity contest. We're now living this Onion satire from 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
The ubiquity of the "news feed" concept could also play a role -- long-running discussions are now fairly impossible. People who disagree just take potshots at each other, instead of getting to the root of the disagreement.
It's a shame there's so much homogeneity across different social sites. Wish people would experiment more.
I love the Reddit format, I think for the most part it works well in terms of commenting (same as HN), but the problem is the "news feed" concept, like you say. A Reddit post is only alive for a few hours before it drops away never to return.
At least on forums whenever there is a reply it bounces back to the top and keeps topics alive.
I used to have friends I would meet in a random video game or chat room and then communicate with them for _years_ over AIM or IRQ or mIRC. In a lot of cases not even knowing their real names.
Reminds me of this old 1997 MMO released by Sony Online Entertainment (and later reimplemented by KaZaA and Skype co-author Priit Kasesalu) named Subspace (renamed Continuum) I grew up playing. So anyways...
10 years ago or so everyone got added to a FB group and suddenly everyone knew each others real names and faces. It was a very strange feeling.
Just some reminiscing.
Why think about it when you can play right now? [0]
It was this game that got me into technology and programming. Implementing bots to run king of the hill or elimination style games.
A bit of history..
One of the original programmers (Jeff P? maybe) included the server software along with the client with the CD. After SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) ended the game, the community ressurected the game by using the included server software.
After many years of cheats due to the stagnating closed-source client, PriitK (of KaZaA and later Skype fame) reimplmented the client from scratch with better encryption, and named it Continuum. It still communicated with the original server software.
Years later, someone would reimplement the server side software named ASSS (a small subspace server) giving complete freedom to implement certain gamemodes and features wanted by the community for decades. For awhile you could only connect to "third party" servers which was a lot scarier and used a different chat/name/etc service than the main zones. It took a few years, but eventually PriitK give access to the encryption code and now most servers and zones are hosted by ASSS.
It was still limited by the original Subspace/Continuum client features though.
Maybe 5 or so years ago the community got the game on Steam Greenlight and we expected a bunch of new users. It didn't really plan out that way but it was fun while it lasted. It didn't happen earlier because while the entire game at this point had been re-implemented by the community - it still used original graphics which were stilled owned by SOE. Somehow, it got done though.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...
Too bad to miss the renewal five years ago.
I think the lack of any 'news feed' or forced revealing of your identity makes it a much more social experience. We're behind a screen talking nonsense and sometimes saying horrible things to each other, but it is fun.
Also Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1, "Nosedive" and Community Season 3 Episode 1, "Biology 101" apparently have similar topics (but I haven't seen them).
Hat tip to ChatGPT for helping me track these down, since I couldn't remember at first what show I'd seen related to this:
https://chat.openai.com/share/d2ac7651-4ab3-4504-9369-7ea4db...
Kinda like private Facebook Groups I guess, except not all controlled by one megacorp, in fact not controlled at all.
You also had to be quite technical to be able to host a site, so that defined the culture. Anarchy but tech nerd.
Social there is for 'social graph'
I found a random book about Boston transportation that was edited by Kibo.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.programmer/c/j0CqgQSoV...
As someone who writes small hobby OpenGL 4 games with zig for fun and because I'm not using a game engine I think I'm doing low level stuff, but this really appropriately puts what I'm doing into perspective. This quote is pretty awesome. I love how we got to where we are these days. Early game developers were true pioneers and we owe you so much!
There are better profiling tools available now. I might be able to do it much better. Plus, not all registers are equal on the 486. Using FS and GS to hold data might be slower than pulling it from RAM. How much on chip cache does a 486 have? I don't know.
Around 1994/5 I was doing perspective-correct texture mapping on a Sun SPARC (with real-time dithering too), an Atari Jaguar and a 486 DX4/100. 16k/sec polys on the DX4 (which is only ~500 at 30fps) sounds modest to me. (We had technically more texture-mapped polys than that, but they had geometric constraints with each other so they weren't all independent polys and shouldn't be counted the same way.)
I was surprised, coming from earlier processors including the 386, to find floating-point was sometimes faster for calculations for things like texture UV interpolation, instead of integers (fixed-point), x86 sub-register tricks and hyperbolic-Bresenham or line-at-infinity techniques to avoid division for perspective.
That recent Mario 64 rewrite has me questioning everything. At least Nintendo's first party developers made the same mistake, and they had the hardware guys right there.
Also, lots of people on Netcom. That was my ISP as well around that time and I still have their DNS server IPs memorized.
I realize that breathless reviews of "Small Wonder" and 40 line Boba Fett .sigs may not be the wisdom of the ages, but it's still an important part of the history of the Internet.
https://archive.org/download/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive/
but I've not [yet] looked at it...
Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have original materials. """
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_a...
Is there a monopoly over Usenet archives, or is it someone arguing about their own posts only?
I would believe it is wrong for someone to have copyright over what's basically distributed public forums.
Also, that's how the law works :/
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_a...
Surely there must be some law or legal precedent that in the act of posting to a public forum, you inherently "license" that content to be freely reproduced, at a minimum for non-commercial purposes as part of distribution in the context of the forum? (But nobody can correct your posts and sell them as a book though.)
I'm wondering if IA gave up because they thought they would lose, or it would be too expensive to go to court in the first place.
One does not simply walk into the Poetry newsgroups. Their strophes are guarded by more than just X-No-Archive message headers. There is evil there that does not sleep, and the grey-locked troll hunters are ever watchful ...
I wonder of it would be better if Google was out of Usenet completely instead of not completely caring.
So they bought DejaNews and slapped a deliberately bad UI onto it. And as every ISP dropped Usenet, people were told "Go to Google Groups to keep talking."
And because the UX was outright worse than the newsreaders they had been using (no killfiles, no moderation for spam, etc), people left for forums.
Nowadays all you get when you search for Usenet providers are folks dedicated to binaries. Piracy won and smothered out discussion in the process. Even the Usenet sub on Reddit is just discussions that toe the line on Reddit's piracy rules.
The only text-only provider I'm still aware of is Eternal-September. I've heard of SDF offering newsgroups as well but I haven't looked into it.
Its current snake head is the UK's online safety bill.
It's been a big improvement.
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
(Well, it works as well as its modern incarnation ever did. It’s been some time since there was a way to cleanly browse a newsgroup using Google Groups).
> Google Groups became operational in February 2001, following Google's acquisition of Deja's Usenet archive.
This is the part people are talking about.
This all could just be a weekend glitch that's fixed on Monday or Tuesday this week. I wouldn't leap to the conclusion of this title without an announcement from Google.
monkeigh, tazer, Naa, MiraiMatt, JimboChiu, MattBlue. I still remember all their screen names
Compare this to later social media, where it has been taken to extremes: I’ve seen Mastodon users whose profiles are a long list of their gender identity, sexual preference, furriness, autism or mental afflictions (officially diagnosed or self-diagnosed), favored political party, and COVID masking status, and in discussion of any topic we are supposed to consider all this.
I’m not sure if your memory is playing tricks on you or what, but politics has basically always been a part of these forums once the internet shed its “nerd” status.
Heck, extremist politics found a safe place for itself in many of internets early forums.
(And “No” in the sense that, as one still reading various fora offering pre-social-media interfaces, there is no escaping that the participants are dwindling and graying. Moreover, the very thing driving people to hang around on unfashionable fora is an eccentricity that is often full-blown mental illness. Once forum activity has become dominated by a few outright cranks, you can’t expect quality discussion.)
And you can leave your endless scrolling on facesbook where it belongs.
I'm very idealistic about alternative approaches, but in a "let's experiment on a small scale" sense as opposed to a "burn it all down" sense. I do wonder if widespread discussion of radical alternatives contributed to a "burn it all down" attitude. Yes, most real modern political systems are a mess of historical contingencies, but maybe democracy functions better if we ignore that and encourage everyone to buy into the system anyways. I miss the "Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" attitude.
https://www.lysator.liu.se/(v1)/etexts/iguide/chap4.bigsig.h...
Also .plan files!
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12 GCS d- s+:+ a++ C++ U? P++ L+ E--- N M++ 5++ e++ h+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
I kept those accounts around because they had a maiden name and other services tied to them, I know for a fact at least one of them has an alternative contact email. There's no information on recovery and no way to contact anybody.
Maybe it's just timing, but, it feels like in the last year or so, things have especially been going downhill with them and there have been more Google related fires to fight.
As a result, I've moved my team off Workspaces and I'm winding down that Google org. And no, Google, I'm not signing up for YouTube Premium. I previously thought things were decoupled decently from Google and enough fallbacks were in place, but now I see the company as a clear risk and am doing everything I can to avoid it.
Because, you know, this page had been nothing but a redirect to Google Groups for 22 years. That seems plenty of time for people to update their bookmarks.
If you weren't affected, this doesn't really sound like an argument made in good faith.
It's an even worse comment when nothing was killed in this instance as far as I can tell. The headline is just a total fabrication. Nothing had been hosted on that URL for 22 years except a 302 redirect. The archive is just as functional (or non-functional) as it had been for the last two decades. But maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe something did use to work for the OP and was broken recently.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...
While I decry the unnecessary loss of this record (which Google maliciously chose not to offer to archivists, knowing full well that archivists would choose to preserve them if given the opportunity), we are actually living in the BEST recorded era of history, because only now have certain kinds of preservation become possible.
For example: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups
It's a roundabout way to do it, but probably includes enough context on what's missing for a historian to dig into other archives to find it. History is like RAID: given enough parity information, you can reconstruct much of what's missing. That's how we know so many lost texts exist, and occasionally find them: stuff we do have references them and sometimes offers clues on where to find it.
Digital information in particular benefits from getting smaller relative to available storage size. Running a Usenet server used to be a huge financial burden. Now I could hold most of it on a keychain. This makes replicating it across the planet to resist the chaos of human nature easier. It might die in one place, but it's also somewhere else. It would take a world-ending event to wipe out anything you might find in /r/DataHoarder.
I don’t understand your comment. Should we not mourn death of 1,000 because many others died, routinely, in the past?
This material is easy to maintain, and presents a new wealth of noise and communication the world has never known.
Dejanews was pretty stable until google bought them and them destroyed them. Not cool, but it’s a free world.
It was in response to the parent comment stating this:
> I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10 years than all of human history has created before it
I believe that more information is being preserved for historians now than ever before, and yet even so we should decry senseless destruction of early internet history.
"Eureka! Here's what some nerd thought about Star Trek!"
I view reddit less as a site, more a collection of lots of subs that vary a lot in how they feel.
Also, I’m not sure if it was true or a conspiracy theory, but I recall once hearing that mods of the most popular subs cannot institute any rules that would reduce “engagement” (and thereby profit), as Reddit would then replace them.
I don't imagine such rules on posting would fly with any of the huge subs, no. But there's always space for more small/medium subs.
People tend not to be interested in using it in favor of easier to consume content that provides an upvote dopamine hit with it.