USENET UNGROUPED

I thought I'd write a quick post in recognition, and mostly 
celebration, of Google Groups finally discontinuing their 
Web-Usenet gateway on the 22nd of Feb. (in whatever time zone they 
care about):
https://support.google.com/groups?p=usenet

Their banner warning about the planned discontinuation at the top 
of the Google Groups pages now says:

  Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or 
  subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.

Given how Google's service has been massively, and uncontrollably, 
abused by spammers, this is definately for the best. Spam filters 
on news servers, or outright rejection of all posts sent from 
Google Groups, has made following discussions involving Google 
Groups users unreliable. Given Google's complete failure to take 
any effective action against the spam floods coming through their 
gateway (tens of thousands of spam posts a day in the recent 
months), this is the best solution. Those selfishly sticking to 
posting via Google Groups even though its operator had clearly 
become the least responsible server operator on Usenet, are now 
forced to find a real news server. At the same time they might even 
find an appreciation of things such as post-wrapping, readable 
quoting, threading, and not replying to posts that are thirty years 
old. But perhaps that's too much to hope for.

On the down side, this leaves narkive.com as the main web Usenet 
archive (posting via it apparantly doesn't work). But it doesn't 
have the historical content that Google Groups aquired when they 
bought Dejanews, so for now the archives are split between Google 
Groups for the best archive of old content, and Narkive for new 
posts. That's for so long as Google do keep their archive 
accessible, and their website has already become very difficult to 
navigate without Javascript. Ironically Google somehow made 
searching on Google Groups quite broken years ago too.

It also means that people are probably less likely to stumble onto 
and discover Usenet via Google Groups, which is actually how I 
first saw it. Although I then set up a news reader in order to send 
posts myself, because it was already obvious to me that Google 
Groups was a rubbish interface (which has only got worse since). 
Yet by allowing so many groups to be flooded with spam, Google 
already broke that advantage anyway. Whereas with a news reader you 
can use killfiles to remove spam, and many news servers run spam 
filters themselves, on Google Groups you were just stuck with it, 
so the Google-view of Usenet as walls of drug and gambling ads was 
really unrepresentative.

The question is also open as to the purpose of the spam. Most 
likely it was for SEO - improving page rankings in Google search 
results. If anything that should have given Google more reason to 
pay attention, but apparantly not. Hopefully now that Google aren't 
putting new posts on the web, there won't be so much incentive for
spammers to switch to tring to post their rubbish via real news
servers.

Overall this whole saga has said a lot about the character of 
Google as a company, and something about the general internet 
society today as well. Had Usenet not been associated with Google, 
you'd imagine people thinking that it would be a good thing for it 
to be linked to a major tech company at a time when it's user-base 
is disappearing. In reality such influences of the modern internet 
have proven poisonous, and it's better off now stuck back in the 
same corner of the internet where it started. Yet that still 
doesn't bode well for its future.

 - The Free Thinker