
Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google - beachwood23
https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/
======
jedberg
It's funny, when I took a tour of the US Geological Survey, the curator of the
collection hated Google (which was just a few blocks away). He said Google is
great _now_ , with all their maps, which were far more accurate and had better
coverage than the USGS.

But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?

He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for
scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning
since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over
their arial scans back to the USGS.

At the time we all told him not to worry, Google would never remove data it
had collected. Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.

~~~
coliveira
Well, that's the problem with the whole internet. Remember those pages created
in the 90s/early 2000s? People thought they were sharing information to the
whole world. It turns out that most pages created in the 90s are now
inaccessible or have been siloed by big corporations. The fact that we allowed
corporations to take over the internet made it an inhospitable place for
everyone else without corporate backing.

~~~
zrm
I don't think it's any harder to create a website than it ever was. The
problem seems to be that corporations have made it so _easy_ to do it within
their silos that people aren't willing to spend ten hours on something they
could do in ten minutes, not realizing that they're going to spend a lot more
than ten hours creating content which the company will then vaporize at random
whenever they feel like it.

~~~
quaintdev
A decade ago, there use to be celebrity websites which had forums, galleries,
blogs now it's just Instagram. Hell so many prominent celebrities don't even
own a domain name in their name. Also, it's not like the content has improved.
Earlier their use to be HQ images in those celeb galleries now the highest
resolution image is 1200x1200. The only thing that has improved is how easily
a celebrity can reach millions everything else has gone downhill with respect
to discussions, forums, galleries, blogs. Most of these are replaced by poor
comments section.

It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their
talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an
Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you
scroll 1 page down on a profile.

Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications
that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant

~~~
justaguyhere
If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their
own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have? It would be trivial for
celebrities to set up their own websites and share whatever stuff they are
sharing. At minimum, they can do this in addition to whatever social media
they are on.

It is as if we are all becoming lazy and/or many of us don't realize the harm
in giving all our info to half a dozen super mega corps. Most of these mega
corps aren't even distributed in the world, they are all American (except
tiktok) which is another interesting angle.

This is going to happen (already happening?) in the webapps/apps world too.
There are so many no-code tools popping up - most will die, the rest will get
acquired by the mega corps. Made a great webapp that is successful? Now you
are stuck with bubble/airtable/shopify/whatever. I cannot name many no-code
tools that lets you export your application to be hosted independently.

I feel like we are on a path where in a few decades, a dozen or two
corporations will control every single aspect of our lives - online
especially, and probably offline too.

~~~
kelnos
> _If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can 't bother owning
> their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have?_

This is a matter of demand, not capability. It seems most celebs just don't
care about setting up their own stuff, and, really, why would they? There are
free platforms out there that give them huge amounts of reach. Most of these
people just don't _need_ their own website. They may come to regret that
decision later, but it's their decision to make.

If a normal guy/gal wants to set up their own domain and website, it's not
hard for them to do so, certainly no harder than it was in the 90s/00s, and
probably a lot easier. The "no-code" stuff certainly has lock-in
disadvantages, but you can simply choose not to use them if you want. Yes,
it's more work, but it was _always_ more work to do it yourself, and always
will be.

------
synack
Just recently I collected all of the archives of comp.lang.ada I could find
and imported them into a public-inbox repository. There's a gap around 1992
that I couldn't find a copy of, but it's otherwise complete. It took a few
days to get everything into the right format and get SpamAssassin dialed in,
but it would certainly be possible to do this for the other comp.* groups if
one had the patience.

[https://archive.legitdata.co/](https://archive.legitdata.co/)

[https://archive.legitdata.co/comp.lang.ada/](https://archive.legitdata.co/comp.lang.ada/)

[https://public-inbox.org/README.html](https://public-inbox.org/README.html)

~~~
sneeuwpopsneeuw
I would personally very much appreciate it if the ada recources could be
placed or archived again on the internet. Lately I had the feeling even books
where a better option for finding information about the language.

------
kazinator
The vast majority of the spam content is injected into these newsgroups via
Google Groups itself, and is not even seen on other NNTP servers.

Blocking posting access to these newsgroups from GG is generally a good thing
for those newsgroups.

Not being able to search the archive is the unfortunate collateral damage
though. Google is not obliged to provide a Usenet archive, I suppose.

Formerly obtained deep links to the content also do not work!

If you formely cited a comp.lang.lisp article by giving a direct link into
Google Groups, people navigating it now get a permission error.

~~~
dependenttypes
What would be a good free NNTP server or NNTP archive?

~~~
giancarlostoro
The D programming language forums work as a NNTP server as well as web forums.
I have in the past downloaded all content from the forum allowing me to have
fully offline archives of threads. This is so underrated. I think NNTP could
make forums much more superior although it feels like there arent many clients
springing up AFAICT.

~~~
jcranmer
Adding some new NNTP features to Thunderbird was my introduction to open-
source software and ultimately led me to being one of the primary maintainers.

NNTP is a wonderful protocol, arguably the simplest of the 4 mailnews
protocols (IMAP, POP, SMTP, and NNTP). While it seems to share the same basic
format as RFC822 messages, it actually tends to avoid some of the more inane
issues with the RFC822 formatting (generally prohibiting comments and
whitespace folding).

Unfortunately, the internet by the early 2000s started turning more and more
into an HTTP(S)-only zone. Usenet itself hemorrhaged its population base,
especially as ISPs shut down their instances (e.g., because someone found one
child porn instance somewhere in alt.binaries.*).

~~~
WalterBright
We periodically hear calls to replace the D NNTP forums with "modern" forum
software, but naaah, nobody does it better than NNTP!

Vladimir Panteleev did, though, write a web interface to NNTP:

[https://forum.dlang.org/](https://forum.dlang.org/)

which is also freely available:

[https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed](https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed)

~~~
giancarlostoro
The only things I would ever modernize about the D forums if I were to ever
bother is just CSS style or something, but honestly, they work, they're faster
than most forums out there and aren't crashing all the time (I'm looking at
you vBulletin!) so it's fantastic.

------
kev009
Google's handling of these critical archives they were given is pretty
abhorrent. The usenet archives should really be made public since there is no
business value to them and they don't care about usenet.

~~~
HenryKissinger
Controversial question: Why should we preserve code that no one uses anymore?
Why should we not allow some information to be simply lost?

~~~
ghaff
No, it's a reasonable question. We're not going to preserve, certainly not in
a findable way, every piece of digital flotsam that has ever been summoned
into existence. In general, we probably should save what we can of Usenet for
historical value as balanced against the fact that the archives are tiny in
the scheme of things. They're probably also messy but that's probably OK.

Interestingly, when some people saved a great deal of the Usenet archives pre-
Deja News, one of them said something to the effect of they wished they had
prioritized saving social discussions and so forth because, by and large,
saving discussions about a bug in a long ago version of SunOS probably wasn't
very interesting.

~~~
nitrogen
_saving discussions about a bug in a long ago version of SunOS probably wasn
't very interesting._

Honestly even that sounds pretty fascinating:

It could help someone gather stats on the nature, frequency, and severity of
bugs over time and across companies from another angle.

It could provide a fresh perspective on modern OSes by showing how historic
OSes did things.

And it might be good material for a course on the history of software
engineering practices, showing classes of bugs that have been eliminated, and
styles of development and customer support that worked or didn't work.

~~~
ghaff
I suspect the information would be too fragmentary to extract anything
statistically useful in it. But, yes, there are possibly historically
interesting nuggets in those sorts of topics.

Here's the article I was thinking of by the way.
[https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/](https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/)

------
jeffbee
The fact that nobody had enough fucks to give to archive these groups tells
you everything you need to know about decentralized peer-to-peer proof-of-work
blockchain nerd hobbies. This content exists on a completely open peer-to-peer
content distribution network and here you are whining that one company -- the
company that already rescued this archive in a midnight U-Haul run 20 years
ago -- failed to archive it.

~~~
dabockster
Seriously! I have the same issue with a lot of modern online
communities/projects too. They all assume whatever platform they're currently
publishing on will be there forever.

Brb archiving my Twitter posts

------
none10287
Google has bought dejanews and has profited immensely from open source and
open information.

So I do think they have an obligation either a) to make the whole archive
available for anyone or b) maintain it properly.

Properly means restoring the fast UI from around 2004.

~~~
imglorp
If you found a human at Google instead of a bot, it would probably say their
only obligation is to their shareholders.

It's probably not a good idea to depend on a public company to steward an
important community.

Does the Internet Archive have copies of all the old stuff at least?

~~~
lstodd
Their only obligation, if we take for granted that there are any humans left
at Google, is keeping the aforementioned bots powered.

Which is sad, but expected.

~~~
dependenttypes
There are quite a few humans at Google, both in HN and at twitter. Sadly all
of them that I talked with seemed like people that I would not want to
interact with again.

------
icheishvili
This type of behavior is why I can never consider GCP. How many people have
been burned at this point by Google randomly shutting down something they rely
on?

~~~
john-shaffer
I've had two Google accounts shut down in the last six months with no
explanation. There is no appeal. The consumer services I've used (Feed Reader,
Play Music) have been shut down, and the cloud service I was most interested
in was luckily shut down before I was able to use it. (They used to have a
service to resize & manipulate images in Blob Storage. I found a good AWS
alternative[1] instead). I cannot rely on Google for anything at all, and
definitely not for something as important as cloud services.

[1] [https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-
handler](https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-handler)

~~~
firebaze
Are there any indications to you why your accounts got shut down? Any pattern
you noticed?

I - as most of us - have a personal google account, and our company uses a
google business account. While I'm following news regarding google cancelling
accounts at will, I fail to notice a reliable pattern: (alleged) fraud and
other illegal stuff seems to comprise a good part of it, but at most 30-50%.

~~~
john-shaffer
No, there is no pattern. The last one happened when I got a new Android phone.
I logged in on my work account and my personal account, and the work account
got suspended. It said "suspicious app", but the only app I used it with was
Google Meet. The personal account was used for much more, but didn't get
suspended. I half suspect that they deliberately have false alarms so they can
act like they're more secure, but it's more likely just a horrible,
unaccountable AI.

I treat all Google accounts as throwaways now and don't use the work email at
all because I want to know that I can actually receive emails that are sent to
me. That's a huge problem even without randomly losing access, because their
spam filter has a ton of false positives and those emails don't get forwarded
to my real address.

~~~
mitchdoogle
>Their spam filter has a ton of false positives and those emails don't get
forwarded to my real address.

This is very interesting to me. I've used Gmail for 10 years now and I've
found the spam filter to be nearly impeccable. I can't recall a single false
positive. I can't even recall a single false negative, though I am moderately
careful about who I provide my email to.

Now I'm left wondering if most people think about Gmail more like me or more
like you...

~~~
peteri
Anyone like me who sends maybe 10 emails a month to gmail.

I'm in their spam sin bin since a spammer managed to find an old test account
on my SMTP server with a weak password and spammed the world for a day or so a
few years ago. The problem is that I don't send enough emails to get out of
the bin.

This isn't a problem google cares about, small senders with no reputation are
basically screwed. I can deliver to gmail hosted accounts I've got a
relationship with (personal & my own work address) but I can't reliably send
to other email addresses at work.

------
userbinator
One thing that's become extremely clear to me over the last decade or so is
that almost all tech companies simply _do not care about the past_ , and I
suspect at least part of that is so their narrative of progress can be
subjected to fewer challenges from those who look back and compare.

Also, and this may be a bit of a tangential point, but the "deny the past
because it has something _bad_ " that Google has effectively done here is
uncomfortably close to the set of recent and far more political events.

~~~
SyneRyder
_> do not care about the past..._

You just reminded me of a quote from an electronic music documentary 25 years
ago. One of the Detroit techno artists insisted on taking the filmmakers to a
historic theatre that had been left to crumble & turned into a car park:

 _" In America especially, nobody tends to care about these kinds of things.
People in America tend to let this shit just die, let it go. No respect for
the history. I, being a techno, electronic, high-tech futurist musician, I
totally believe in the future! But as well, I believe in a historic and well
kept past. I believe there are some things that are important. Now, maybe this
is more important like this, because in this atmosphere, you can realize how
much people don't care, how much they don't respect. And it can make you
realize how much you should respect."_

\- Derrick May, DJ/Composer, Universal Techno (1996)

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdox6H7FJBU&t=955s](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdox6H7FJBU&t=955s)

The segment starts at 16:00 in the video and is about 2 minutes long.

~~~
Lammy
I don't think it's quite as simple as "Americans don't care about the past"
when discussing cities like Detroit. The _actual_ reason those places were
left to rot is a lot worse imo, and it's the same reason that led to San
Francisco becoming such a (cheap) haven for LGBT people / artists / etc in the
1970s and '80s: [http://cornersideyard.blogspot.com/2020/06/repost-
personal-s...](http://cornersideyard.blogspot.com/2020/06/repost-personal-
segregation-story.html)

------
Animats
"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past
controls the future" \- Orwell, "1984"

------
fmajid
> Usenet predates Google's spam handling tools

In fact Usenet predates spam itself, since the first spam (Canter & Siegel)
was on Usenet itself in 1994 (I was there).

------
aidenn0
Anyone know if anyone not google has newsgroup archives publicly accessible
(The Internet Archive maybe?)

~~~
rikroots
I found this Usenet Historical Collection link -
[https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical](https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical)
\- in a previous HN thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16667796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16667796)).

I have no idea how useful the collection may prove to be. I found 'comp' but
it doesn't offer a webpage view, just a link to download a file.
[https://archive.org/details/usenet-comp](https://archive.org/details/usenet-
comp)

~~~
u801e
Maybe someone could set up a public inbox[1] instance that allows access to
those groups either via HTTP or NNTP.

[1] [https://public-inbox.org/README.html](https://public-
inbox.org/README.html)

------
CrankyBear
No, no, no. These groups and other Usenet groups archives must be preserved.
They're our history.

------
imhoguy
Anyone looking for a hobby? It is time to become a data hoarder
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/)

------
rdiddly
Either those Usenet groups are not part of the world, or they don't consist of
information, or Google just failed at "organizing the world's information."

~~~
StavrosK
Google has definitely failed. Finding anything that's not frecent is basically
impossible.

------
WoodenChair
I read the article and I read the threads here, and maybe I missed it—but why
did these groups disappear? Were they banned due to bad words or a mistaken
spam filter?

~~~
DanBC
Here's what I get:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.forth](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.forth)

> Banned Content Warning

> The group that you are attempting to view (comp.lang.forth) has been
> identified as containing spam, malware or other malicious content. Content
> in this group is now limited to view-only mode for those with access.

> Group owners can request an appeal after they have taken steps to clean up
> potentially offensive content in the forum. For more information about
> content policies on Google Groups, please see our Help Centre article on
> abuse and our Terms of Service.

There's no content available for me.

~~~
jjgreen
Forth is pretty grim, but I wouldn't go _that_ far ...

------
summerlight
[https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&...](https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=%22comp.lang.forth%22+%22comp.lang.lisp%22&sort_by=)

Looks like there has been (likely automated, nearly all of them are the same
Italian phrase) mechanical legal complaints and it probably caused this
instance of automated blocking going wild.

As an engineer I can understand the desire to automate everything, but please
at least have some heuristics to detect this kind of easy-to-detect mechanical
behavior before giving the model a full authority to block anyone it doesn't
like.

~~~
__void
Okay, I did some research, and I think I figured out what caused these usenet
group banning.

A Genoese lawyer has been a victim of harassing and heavy doxing for some
time, you can find many twitter accounts accusing him of paedophilia in
cahoots with epstein, berlusconi, the pope and so on (no, I'm not kidding;
clearly the stalker has obvious mental sanity problems).

The stalker is very prolific and is wallpapering the internet with his copy-
paste-accouse in every corner, from newspaper comments to ancient forums to
usenet. The lawyer report and ask for removation where he can but also he does
not seem very worried because it seems that this issue goes on from two years
...

I don't think I can say the name of the subjects in question but in any case
I'm archiving the harassment accounts before proceeding with the report, then
I'll try to get in touch with the lawyer and see if he can request a new, less
"coarse" censorship.

------
jolmg
> since there is no other comprehensive archive after Google's purchase of
> Dejanews around 20 years ago

Was I naive in thinking that The Internet Archive would have long archived
this type of thing?

~~~
foresto
The Internet Archive is younger than Deja News. Someone would have had to
provide the data. Did they?

If you want to look, you might start here:
[https://archive.org/details/usenet](https://archive.org/details/usenet)

------
msie
WTF Google? Are you now so full of young programmers who have no respect for
programming history? You’ve lost all greek cred that’s for sure.

------
mark_l_watson
Too many people and companies don’t appreciate culture enough. Maintaining a
cultural record should apparently not be left to just one company.

Thanks for posting this, it reminded me to donate again to archive.org, which
I just did.

I use ‘culture’ to include anything creative, anything that we experience as
humans. Everything should be preserved, schools should be well funded, as
should the arts.

------
lkirk
Is this something that the internet archive would preserve?

------
rurban
Ridiculous. They are blaming missing moderators, but only Google would be able
to solve the spam problem. They open now these old forums, and Gmail is mostly
spam free. Now you cannot even browse the archives. Where is the internet
police when you need them.

------
zxcvbn4038
For a long time I've wanted to revisit some the old Usenet stuff. I knew
someone in the who ran a commercial usenet feed service in the early 90s and
their whole setup depended heavily on low level backplane configuration,
number of spindles, disk rotation speed, etc. - a lot of details that AWS
hides from most of us. Using everything I've learned about distributed systems
in the last thirty years I bet I could build a really awesome news feed today.

Of course the downside of Usenet was most people expected conversations to
disappear after a couple weeks or a month but there was always some jerk that
kept everything and refused to delete anything.

------
DoctorNick
It's becoming clear to me that Google has become a far, far worse monopoly
than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft just controlled our computers; Google
controls our access to history.

~~~
beagle3
Potentially far worse - but Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in
multiple fields the way MS did.

They sucked the air out of advertising (in cooperation with Facebook) leaving
none for others. But I consider that a small loss.

Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity software, stalled the
web with IE6, and more.

Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that
damage just yet.

~~~
walkingolof
> Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS
> did.

I beg the difference, Gmail have not changed much since I signed up 16
year:ish etc

They are all the same, as soon as competition goes away, this happens.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
But Gmail is interoperable with other mail systems and they didn't create
incompatible extensions to email (AFAIAA); that's quite different to how IE6
was.

If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other
MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could
read. That would be analogous to what IE6 was up to.

~~~
simpss
take a look at AMP for emails...

[https://amp.dev/about/email/](https://amp.dev/about/email/)

~~~
jefftk
amp4email is open for anyone to support, and per
[https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-
email...](https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-email-with-
amp/) it's supported by Yahoo Mail, Mail.ru, Outlook, and Gmail. It's not
comparable to IE-only features.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

------
LockAndLol
Why are people even relying on Google to keep any product alive? It's a
business, not a charity. They don't do a single thing out of good will. It
always has the goal of getting money in the short or long term. Knowing their
quarterly obligations to shareholders, that's probably short term.

These groups should be putting more effort into federalisation and
decentralisation. Make it possible to store all of this data in a distributed
fashion and stop relying on a central authority for archiving purposes.

~~~
nabla9
Those groups are running on decentralized system and open protocol
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet)

The problem is that there is no other searchable archives.

------
cptnapalm
I was learning C, once upon a time, and had a bug that I couldn't figure out.
It worked fine on Linux/x86, but was wrong on Solaris/sparc64. Deep Google
diving found a newsgroup post from 1992 or so with a very similar problem; it
was an endian problem. My search-fu may have been weak, but an old newsgroup
post that helped me solve my problem, not stackoverflow or any other site.

------
NewEntryHN
Either this archive exists elsewhere, either now is not the proper time for
panic -- it was when Google became sole owner of this archive.

------
haecceity
So Google Groups archives usenet stuff? Where are the usenet stuff hosted
originally? How do I connect to it without Google Groups?

~~~
ghaff
The Internet is a distributed system. Usenet was never centrally hosted
anywhere AFAIK. It was scattered around lots of individual systems. You'd have
to look up the detailed history but Deja News brought together what it could
at one point. It was subsequently purchased by Google and it was folded into
Google Groups.

------
smsm42
I think everybody should have learned the lesson now - do not trust Google -
or any other major megacorp, but especially Google - to preserve any data for
longer that they are contractually obliged to. If there needs to be historic
preservation, it should be done by independent organization specifically
created for that purpose.

------
fizixer
Can anyone tell me how Google got hold of the whole usenet (I know it was like
15-20 years ago) which looks to me like a community service kinda thing.

Like when Google decided it's going to host comp.lang.c, can there be only one
comp.lang.c on the internet, or can someone else start hosting comp.lang.c as
well?

~~~
rjsw
That isn't how it works, usenet is distributed, you can still access it using
non-Google servers.

------
DonHopkins
Since when were Forth and Lisp historical programming languages??! People
still use them. _HARUMPH!_

~~~
velosol
If it makes you feel better, comp.lang.python is also blocked:

[https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python/](https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python/)

~~~
DonHopkins
No, because I like Python too, but it would make me feel much better if
comp.lang.perl was blocked.

------
avodonosov
There is a comp.lang.lisp archive published in 2009.

> In 2009, Ron Garret published a 700MB archive file of all of comp.lang.lisp

[https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/notes.html](https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/notes.html)

------
Arjuna144
They are really shooting their own feet which such moves. They confirm,
validate and strengthen the already existing trend to avoid vendor lock in at
all cost and move to open, possibly self-hosted and export friendly platforms!

This is really bad marketing

------
jolmg
> Perhaps Google can be convinced to restore the content

The support ticket was deleted, so I guess not.

------
totalforge
SELF FOOT SHOOT DUP

~~~
astrobe_
Actually, what I saw on comp.lang.forth the last few times I checked it
(coincidentally, I tried yesterday) makes the news not really surprising.

Aside from the spam, it gradually switched from passionate but respectful
debates to name calling and plain insults from newbies to what remained of the
veterans.

One could read very long arguments between Elizabeth D. Rather, CEO at that
time of Forth, Inc. which she founded with C. Moore somewhere in the 70ies,
and Jeff Fox (RIP), who was working at that time with Moore; Moore left his
first company to pursue its adventures in hardware, making different "Forth
processors", which eventually led to the RTX2000 which powered, notably, the
Rosetta probe.

------
quantified
(Repeating one of the comments from the post):

> Has anyone (EFF?) considered the aspect of destroying evidence of prior art
> in the public domain?

I think there’s a case to be made for stewardship of these groups for that
reason.

------
ryanmarsh
Thank god. I said some really dumb shit on those lists in my youth that I
regret.

------
grappler
This kind of thing makes it really easy to get interested, and stay
interested, in decentralization tech.

Once you see things in this light, the new flavor of the month online service
just doesn't hold any allure.

------
Havoc
I'm hearing a fair bit of chatter in SEO circles about google de-indexing
pages so this certainly rings true.

I guess there was this unjustified assumption that google only adds & never
subtracts.

------
hosh
Maybe it is something that a non-profit dedicated towards preserving knowledge
and internet content (such as Internet Archive) should be handling anyways.

------
bawolff
Maybe these types of historical archives can be turned over to internet
archive. I trust them a lot more than google for this.

------
Igelau
If an AI decided to shut off comp.lang.lisp, I'd say it's officially too late
to solve the Alignment Problem.

------
photon-torpedo
Guess comp.lang.lisp has too many posts with (((code))) in them... ;)

------
ZinniaZirconium
alt.sex is still there and you don't get an adult content warning unless you
choose the desktop version.

------
ipunchghosts
i would like to find the quickbasic archives. anyone know how i can get them?

~~~
DanBC
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/microsoft.public.bas...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/microsoft.public.basic.dos)

Not safe for work!!!

------
bawana
is google sinking? Between their mothballing/deletion of services and the
obnoxious signup ads on youtube. I am wondering what is going on?

~~~
wegs
It's not doing so hot:

1) Hiring standards have drifted downwards over the past 15 years. Google used
to be super-elite, compact, do-no-evil, massive-profit-per-employee. It's now
a 140,000 person organization, and at that scale, standards just aren't high.
You have a team of dozens of incompetent people doing what one person used to
do.

2) With COVID19, ad revenues have crashed. It's not clear the impact on
Google.

3) The smart, ethical folks on top (folks like Larry, Sergei, and Eric) are
gone, and replaced with professional managers. They were smart to pick an
internal CEO, but most of their executive team comes from places like
Microsoft, Oracle, or Morgan. Having known a number of professional
executives, the key skill is climbing executive ladders and moving into
positions of power, not running successful companies.

4) Their products are increasingly starting to crash-and-burn, especially in
B2B. Their culture relies on automated systems over people, and their
automated systems have taken down tons of mission-critical businesses.
Automated works well at 1000 people supporting 7 billion in B2C (small elite
team model), and not so well for a massive, 100k person company.

5) I've switched mostly to non-Google products because they're better for what
I need. AOL was massive too at one point. Losing the tech edge is not good. I
still use gmail.

On the other hand, their revenues have continued to rise exponentially since
they started. So perhaps they're doing fine?

~~~
jcrawfordor
The cases of IBM and more arguably Microsoft and Oracle tell us that if you
reach a certain scale, you can continue to coast for a very, very long time
after you lose relevance. Microsoft might be an example of having the glide
time to regain it depending on how Windows 10 and Azure go over years, but
it's far easier for a large corporation to spend billions defending their
shrinking turf than to make the big changes usually required to regain it. The
problem is that defending your shrinking turf can show positive revenue
numbers for quite some time, so it all looks great while it happens...

------
gnabgib
This is editorialized (actual title: "Some Usenet groups suspended in Goggle
Groups"), or on LWN[1] "Historical programming-language groups disappearing
from Google" (basically the same content)

[1]: [https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/](https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/)

~~~
dang
Ok, we've changed to that from
[https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/61391913?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/61391913?hl=en).
Thanks!

------
Ijumfs
It was a terrible idea to entrust _ANYTHING_ to Google.

Time to de-Google the whole Web.

------
staycoolboy
On the plus side, evidence of my awful usenet etiquette from the late 80's is
disappearing with some of these groups.

