Starting on February 22, 2024, you can no longer use Google Groups (at groups.google.com) to post content to Usenet groups, subscribe to Usenet groups, or view new Usenet content. You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups.
In addition, Google’s Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server and associated peering will no longer be available, meaning Google will not support serving new Usenet content or exchanging content with other NNTP servers.
↫ Google Groups Help
According to Google, the reason for removing Usenet support is the declining popularity of Usenet, claiming that “much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam”. I can’t validate that claim, but regardless, relying on Google to access Usenet was never a good idea in the first place. There’s countless proper Usenet clients out there that won’t perform a classic Google rug pull.
If it doesn’t involve advertising, never rely on a service by Google.
The frustrating thing is keeping All these side projects going would cost them less than a rounding error
Yes, but they are very significant in the manager in charge of shutting it down. Ended projects costing company 40 Million a year. That’s like a raise or something their next review.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
40 million? Ha, that’s nothing. The recent google layoffs must have saved the company a lot more than that! First world problems, eh?
I would say at the Google scale (or Microsoft, or …) you need to be a unicorn to stay alive.,
Meaning either a billion users, a billion dollar revenue per year, or highly important for prestige and/or keep backends running.
Even then, I have seen important projects shut down without a proper replacement, hence this not enough.
The problem stems from VPs chasing “their own thing”. Especially transplants from other companies with different cultures and goals. Continuing on with an existing project is a death sentence in terms of career growth, so that have to “innovate”.
And part of that innovation is taking resources and teams from abandoned projects.
It seems like another of the “Old Google” products is being sunset.
Yes, Usenet is practically dead today. And yes, this thing definitely did not make any money for Google.
However how many of the “prestige” products can they drop before the brand image takes a hit?
I stopped relying on google years ago. Frankly anything ad supported is a no go for me.
More valuable than the web interface was perhaps Google’s free Usenet (NNTP) server. Most other NNTP servers out there are subscription-based. Does anyone here know of free alternatives to Google?
You can register with Eternal September (ironic given it’s name). They provide free access to all the text based groups.
I will try that, thanks!
Hello
I think that Google has a point saying that the USENET is full of spam. I tried to became moderator of some old USENET comp.* groups years ago, to remove the spam, but it was impossible. The Big 8 (previously the Big 7) just laugh at my face and told me to do something more useful instead of trying to moderate and revive some old groups.
Regards
Generally, a trend I’ve seen is Google retiring “pro bono” services that weren’t meant to make money: For example, the ability to have YouTube host your videos ad-free (now they reserve the right to put ads even if you haven’t opted in), the ability upload your own music to Play Music (they killed Play Music in favor of YouTube Music which doesn’t have that), and now Google Groups. I wonder, is Google Patents next? I hope not. There is no real alternative to Google Patents.
Until three or fours months ago, there were still a handful of useful Usenet groups. Then they suddenly got flooded with Indian, Thai, and Indonesian spam. The amount of useful messages plummeted overnight. Apparently lots of this spam is coming through Google, so maybe this is actually a positive move.
If you rely on goole for anything, you are a fool.
NaGERST,
This is what I learned from your typo 🙂
http://www.goole.com/about/
http://gooleisnotgoogle.weebly.com/