[HN Gopher] Historical programming-language groups disappearing ...
___________________________________________________________________
Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google
Author : beachwood23
Score : 459 points
Date : 2020-07-28 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| imhoguy wrote:
| Anyone looking for a hobby? It is time to become a data hoarder
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
| DoctorNick wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| How evil you are is a function of how much power you have and
| for how long.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Google is becoming worse monopoly trough natural evolution of
| it's core business. It seems more offhand way. Network effects
| and economies of scale. Microsoft monopoly grew by planning and
| plotting. Bill Gates had genuinely sinister motivations and
| used deception and dirty play.
|
| To fix problems caused by Google, you need to change the
| principles of competition law. Microsoft was knowingly doing
| lots of stuff that violated laws. It was just very hard to
| prove it.
| DoctorNick wrote:
| Yeah, that's the main reason that there isn't as much push
| back to the control that Google is starting to exert over all
| of us.
| PaulStatezny wrote:
| Do you have any links to evidence of these statements about
| Microsoft? I'd be interested to read more.
| nabla9 wrote:
| It's kind of weird to get this question when you lived it
| and there seems to be relatively little to Google.
|
| I mean, it was all in the news, trade magazines, business
| journals. Blackmailing OEM's, intentionally breaking things
| and making them incompatible. At least the legal battles
| are documented somewhere and Wikipedia has something about
| them, but they were just the tip of the iceberg.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Co
| r....
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
|
| There must be book somewhere.
|
| Dan Gilmour's articles in San Jose Mercury news from 90's
| should be somewhere.
|
| Basically small software startups had to have Microsoft
| Strategy. They had to find way to stay out of Microsoft
| radar or MS would steal their work, their developers or
| block them. You sue them like Stack did and MS just stalls
| few years and pays few millions in damages. It was worth of
| losing in court to protect monopoly.
|
| Big OEM's like Dell had to do what MS said or MS would up
| their price. It was straight blackmail from monopoly
| position.
| [deleted]
| Stubb wrote:
| And each other.
| beagle3 wrote:
| 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.
| hysan wrote:
| Disagree in that they've already done plenty of damage.
|
| Easiest example is with RSS - entered the RSS Reader market
| for free and at a loss and effectively killed competition
| because you cannot compete with that. Then subsequently
| killed Google Reader. This chain of moves essentially drove
| RSS to being obsolete which in turn made everyone far more
| reliant on Google and social media.
|
| Now extend this to other products that they've started for
| free and subsequently killed. It's not the same as embrace,
| extend, extinguish, but the result is the same. You kill off
| competition and stunt progress.
| beagle3 wrote:
| I don't think RSS is a good example. Everyone I know who
| used google reader switched to a different RSS reader;
|
| It's mostly that RSS isn't monetizable as easily as web
| pages. I think FB and Twitter dropping their feeds had a
| more significant effect; regardless, RSS was always niche.
| DoctorNick wrote:
| Yeah, they all realized how much tracking and advert
| impressions you lose with RSS. It seems like that's
| happened with a lot of web technologies that aren't
| conducive to that since Google's taken the reins.
| hysan wrote:
| If we're going to go with anecdotes, I can counter with
| all of my friends (entirely non-technical) simply stopped
| consuming via RSS because there were no alternatives at
| that time that ticked all the boxes.
|
| For me, the key is that Google Reader actually killed off
| competing products during its existence. Then when they
| killed of Google Reader, that stunted the ecosystem
| because anyone who wanted to provide an alternative was
| starting from the ground up. All the time that could have
| been spent driving RSS forward was instead spent on
| catchup.
|
| FB and Twitter dropping their feeds may not have happened
| if the RSS ecosystem evolved to benefit them in some way.
| specialist wrote:
| Now occurs to me that one could clone any given Google
| service (product), ensure maximum compatibility, wait for
| Google to biff, and then welcome all the orphans.
| walkingolof wrote:
| > 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.
| anchpop wrote:
| I'm still upset with them for killing Inbox
| harha wrote:
| I used that as an opportunity to leave most Google
| services all together, the product decisions just can't
| be trusted from a user perspective.
|
| For most services there's a better alternative (e.g.
| DuckDuckGo with bangs for search, native apps whenever
| possible, markdown for notes and texts) - in general this
| was a learning process for me to distrust systems that
| control me more than the other way around by creating a
| lock-in to an ecosystem.
|
| I feel it's worth taking the time to understand systems a
| bit more. Once the learning is there, much of the
| convenience that Google offers can be replicated through
| good processes and automation.
| master-litty wrote:
| Me too. I still don't understand why it was killed.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Gmail is as notorious as IE6 was for its rather poor
| support of HTML and CSS in email.
| simpss wrote:
| take a look at AMP for emails...
|
| https://amp.dev/about/email/
| jefftk wrote:
| amp4email is open for anyone to support, and per
| https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-
| email... 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)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity
| software, stalled the web with IE6
|
| Android, GSuite, Chrome
| beagle3 wrote:
| Google are smart enough to maintain a duopoly (iOS,
| Office/365, Safari) Whereas Microsoft tried to kill all
| competitors (and all too often succeeded). That's a huge
| difference.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| So far. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Though Android's marketshare today is extremely similar
| to Windows compared to macOS early in the period for
| which Microsoft is criticized. Similarly, Safari and
| Firefox combined have low enough marketshare (currently
| estimated around 21%) versus Chrome estimated 65% (and
| growing) to make real, very concerned comparisons to the
| early parts of the IE6 era, if not its peak (yet).
|
| The difference is that it is still early and Google
| hasn't killed their competitors _yet_. I can 't tell you
| whether or not they are "trying" to, just that I agree
| with the above poster that Google has the potential to be
| _worse_ , and possibly history repeating itself on some
| of the exact same product lines.
| Lammy wrote:
| > stalled the web with IE6
|
| By inventing XMLHTTPRequest?
| moomin wrote:
| I dunno, I look out at the world and think that maybe making
| journalism unprofitable may have had some negative effects
| that are a bit bigger than web standards not advancing that
| fast?
| an_opabinia wrote:
| You're absolutely right.
|
| Though the same people who complain about the loss of
| profitable journalism also run adblockers and sub/unsub
| from major newspapers over their op-eds.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Personally I would pay a decent subscription to a journal
| or newspaper if they offered incredibly high quality
| content ad-free. Instead what we have are cheap ad-
| saturated papers competing with each other to the lowest
| common denominator.
|
| It's a vicious cycle kicked off by Google and co.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| To get to be a 'journal or newspaper that offers
| incredibly high quality content ad-free' you need
| funding. Arguably you also need to go up against the
| richest and most powerful people in the World, and you
| need to protect against someone buying it and shutting it
| down.
|
| You need a lot of principles and some money, getting
| those things together in the same place seems hard.
|
| Was news in the past better ( more comprehensive? more
| verified?), or just better presented?
| Avicebron wrote:
| I'm of two minds on this and they aren't totally squared
| together, but I think they are both fair.
|
| 1. I'm somewhat nostalgic to physical newspapers for a
| couple of reasons, I think because they were physical and
| required a little bit more effort. They felt more
| authoritative and verifiable, that's the nostalgia.
| However I think there was another benefit to the
| journalists, because they were crafting a physical body
| of work, I probably naively believe it instilled a sense
| of duty in that work. Personally I feel like if my
| product (not code) was a fleeting piece of information,
| easily changeable and forgotten among a deluge of other
| work. I would not feel as obligated to honor the craft.
| So in short, less comprehensive and better verified and
| presented.
|
| 2. News was concentrated, I don't think this was
| necessarily a good thing. This is somewhat contradictory
| to 1. But I think this concentration was an easier to
| accept narrative and speaking to my above point, that
| presented a level of even-headedness to the whole affair
| of understanding the world and our place in it. The
| firehose that was unleashed with Google was good, but it
| then signaled the death of lots of rational measured
| thought and brought us to where we are today.
| moomin wrote:
| Not always, but it had an independent source of funding,
| and that made things like Woodward and Bernstein
| possible.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they
| haven't done that damage just yet.
|
| That is changing extremely fast.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Anyone know if anyone not google has newsgroup archives publicly
| accessible (The Internet Archive maybe?)
| eej71 wrote:
| https://www.eternal-september.org/
|
| I think you have to register. Not sure how much history is
| there.
| dependenttypes wrote:
| A lot of posts are missing from this one.
| u801e wrote:
| Most free and ISP based usenet feeds had a lot of missing
| posts, especially since they allowed older posts to expire.
| Even the commercial usenet providers only started their
| archives about 12 years ago.
| rikroots wrote:
| I found this Usenet Historical Collection link -
| https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical - in a previous HN
| thread (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
| u801e wrote:
| 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
| bensw wrote:
| It should be the full archive.
| staycoolboy wrote:
| On the plus side, evidence of my awful usenet etiquette from the
| late 80's is disappearing with some of these groups.
| rurban wrote:
| 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.
| icheishvili wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Google Achilles heel is they have two businesses
|
| a) Spy on people and sell the data to advertisers.
|
| b) Use that data to directly push ads
|
| That's basically incompatible with b2b services. Or consumer
| services. As a customer you're judged by how valuable the
| data they are collecting on you is. Which is less than a
| support call costs. That bleeds into every facet of their
| business. As such even if you pay them money you get the same
| treatment because they can't think any different.
| rsa25519 wrote:
| > sell the data to advertisers
|
| Do they?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| They don't sell peoples personal data at least publicly.
| But that makes them care even less about end users, even
| paying end users. Which means a business is foolish to
| rely on them.
| firebaze wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mkl wrote:
| How do you sign up for new accounts given the mobile
| number requirement? Do you just reuse the same number?
|
| I tried to make a Google account for work use the other
| day, and got stuck at that point. Given Google's history
| it seems silly to use my personal account for work, or to
| connect the two accounts in any way.
| john-shaffer wrote:
| I had two personal accounts that I registered before
| GMail had a phone requirement. I don't remember setting
| up the work account, but I probably just used my normal
| phone number.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| >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...
| hedora wrote:
| Something like this allowed me to disable gmail's spam
| filter when I set up forwarding:
|
| https://c-command.com/spamsieve/help/turning-off-the-
| gmail-s
|
| It is an awful hack. If they can't be bothered to
| maintain their spam filters, they should at least let
| people opt out.
| john-shaffer wrote:
| Thank you!
| kazinator wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What would be a good free NNTP server or NNTP archive?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| What you can do with NNTP is run a local NNTP caching
| server. Then connect to that server instead of the real
| one. Your caching server can retain articles as long as you
| want; much longer than the upstream server.
|
| (Though mere long article retention is not necessarily the
| best archive interface, of course.)
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not well-versed in the solutions in this
| space. Maybe there is some NNTP cacher out there that also
| has a web archive interface into it or whatever.
| [deleted]
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.*).
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm a broken record on this, so you may have seen me
| point it out before, but NNTP started dying in the mid-
| late 1990s, when binaries took over. It was
| extraordinarily difficult to keep reliable full-feed
| binaries (NNTP is the dumbest conceivable way to share
| large binaries), and if you couldn't do that, customers
| would yell and ultimately abandon your service for a
| cheaper one, while opting for more centralized Internet
| NNTP services.
|
| Ultimately I think the web would have eaten Usenet
| anyways, but it's a shame; we were Freenix-competitive (I
| think I independently invented the INN history cache),
| and that was some of the most fun I've had doing systems
| engineering work.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Ah I see, I'm not more curious that you say it's really
| simple, I haven't read the spec much personally. I loved
| the concept of the D forums so much I intended to attempt
| to setup my own NNTP daemon from scratch, but it's in a
| bucket list of projects I want to try out, the only
| resource I could think of reading are the RFCs not sure
| if anybody else has documented Usenet otherwise.
| kazinator wrote:
| I've been using the NNTP server provided by
| https://www.aioe.org/ for quite a few years.
|
| There is also https://www.eternal-september.org/ which I
| used.
|
| AOIE requires no authentication. The Eternal September server
| requires account registration via the web site; then you use
| an authenticated NNTP connection.
|
| There are other servers out there.
|
| These sites do not provide any archive.
| gnabgib wrote:
| 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/
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed to that from
| https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/61391913?hl=en.
| Thanks!
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Here's what I get:
|
| 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.
| synack wrote:
| 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/comp.lang.ada/
|
| https://public-inbox.org/README.html
| sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote:
| 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.
| Ijumfs wrote:
| It was a terrible idea to entrust _ANYTHING_ to Google.
|
| Time to de-Google the whole Web.
| jolmg wrote:
| > 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?
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| microtherion wrote:
| GOOGLE FORTH HATE IF HONK THEN
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Thank god. I said some really dumb shit on those lists in my
| youth that I regret.
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| Guess comp.lang.lisp has too many posts with (((code))) in
| them... ;)
| CrankyBear wrote:
| No, no, no. These groups and other Usenet groups archives must be
| preserved. They're our history.
| none10287 wrote:
| 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.
| microtherion wrote:
| I remember how awesome the initial version of the Google usenet
| archive was. It's horrifying how much they have let the UX
| deteriorate.
| imglorp wrote:
| 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?
| specialist wrote:
| _"... their only obligation is to their shareholders. "_
|
| That'd be an improvement.
|
| Page & Brin retain controlling interest, despite their
| minority stake.
| lstodd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wegs wrote:
| Smug, superior, arrogant, yet surprisingly incompetent?
|
| (Disclaimer: I know some really awesome people at Google
| who I respect the heck out of; that's just my impression
| of the /prevailing/ culture there now, but it's far from
| everyone)
| skinkestek wrote:
| Warning: contains snark. Not all googlers are bad but I
| am grumpy. There's now one you despise so much as the one
| you loved that betrayed you and all that.
|
| -------------
|
| Busily making sure it feels even more lame to try to give
| them feedback? Or wondering what thriving ecosystem they
| can destroy next after
|
| - destroying rss,
|
| - participating in destroying federated messaging,
|
| - trying to kill all independent browser engines and
| replace it with a nerfed on that "sadly" can't block ads
|
| Some ideas:
|
| Maybe they can come up with a more opaque way to shut
| down peoples accounts?
|
| Or maybe a more sneaky way to befriend the Chinese
| government?
| imglorp wrote:
| And that whole AMP thing.
|
| And don't forget about that whole extension of the
| government thing. https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-
| what-it-seems/
| dependenttypes wrote:
| Yes, in addition to often being pretentious,
| judgemental/prejudicial, and pretending to be moral while
| working for a morally corrupt company. I am sure that
| there are good people in google trying to change it from
| the inside or people who for economic reasons did not
| have a choice but I doubt that there are many of them. It
| is also annoying how all google employees on HN suddenly
| disappear on threads that talk about the new cool
| unethical thing that google decided to do.
| zentiggr wrote:
| Wait, Google feels any obligations at all? I thought they
| only made decisions based on what's most likely to maximize
| their growth?
| nine_k wrote:
| How did it profit from the Usenet archives? Genuinely curious.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _How did it profit from the Usenet archives? Genuinely
| curious._
|
| Dejanews was the seed material for Google Groups, any profit
| derived from that (ads) was from content posted to Usenet by
| people who never intended for it to be used for that.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Groups doesn't (and didn't ever?) Show ads as far as I
| know. So you're reaching for second or third order effects
| at best.
| mtkd wrote:
| You think that realtime ad impressions is all they get
| from you reading granular forum posts?
|
| Sadly, even in 2020, nothing has yet replaced what Deja
| was at the time it got acquired and destroyed.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > So you're reaching for second or third order effects at
| best.
|
| I'm curious what second or third order effects you think
| a usenet archive had on GG.
| mtkd wrote:
| From G side they gained users interacting with 50K+
| topics and occasionally posting views, sentiment etc.
| (and likely all Deja News historic interactions)
|
| In addition to the search history, email content, geo
| location etc. G have for many people
| Animats wrote:
| "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls
| the past controls the future" - Orwell, "1984"
| lkirk wrote:
| Is this something that the internet archive would preserve?
| LockAndLol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Those groups are running on decentralized system and open
| protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
|
| The problem is that there is no other searchable archives.
| [deleted]
| hosh wrote:
| Maybe it is something that a non-profit dedicated towards
| preserving knowledge and internet content (such as Internet
| Archive) should be handling anyways.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| i would like to find the quickbasic archives. anyone know how i
| can get them?
| DanBC wrote:
| https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/microsoft.public.bas...
|
| Not safe for work!!!
| fmajid wrote:
| > 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).
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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.
| kev009 wrote:
| 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.
| eternalban wrote:
| > they don't care about usenet.
|
| They cared enough about to kill it.
| enneff wrote:
| Google didn't kill Usenet; it was already pretty much dead. Web
| forums had all but taken their place (and where are their
| archives now? So much is lost).
|
| If you look at the history, Google basically rescued the data
| from a collapsing Deja News, and made it available again. A
| nice gesture, which didn't serve to benefit Google much in the
| long term.
|
| If we want to preserve history then we can't rely on for-profit
| companies. We need to instead fund non-profits whose specific
| charter is archival and preservation, like the Internet
| Archive.
| neilv wrote:
| When Google started, there was maybe an overall altruistic,
| visionary, principled culture among many pre-Web Internet-y
| people, and it looked like Google was of that same school of
| thought.
|
| (This was at the same time that there was a gold rush of IPO
| plays, hiring anyone who could spell "HTML", and plopping them
| down in slick office space, Aerons for everyone, and lavish
| launch parties, with tons of oblivious posturing and self-
| congratulating. But Google stood out as looking technically
| smart, at least I believed the "Don't Be Evil", since that was
| the OG culture, and it seemed a savvy reference to behaviors in
| industry and awareness of the power that it was clear they
| would probably have.)
|
| That might be why it wasn't surprising to hear of things like
| someone entrusting a bunch of old university backup tapes to
| Google's stewardship.
|
| This has played out with mixed results, and I think Google
| could be doing much better for humanity and for techie culture.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Controversial question: Why should we preserve code that no one
| uses anymore? Why should we not allow some information to be
| simply lost?
| minerjoe wrote:
| You assumption "no one uses anymore" is glaringly wrong in
| this case.
|
| Those archives are full of useful and informative
| information.
|
| Not everthing changes fast. Common Lisp has been around for
| 30 years basically unchanged. The discussions back there can
| be truly informative for today.
|
| It does take time to wade thought it, but people have been
| collecting (via the google archive, when it existed, sigh)
| curated lists.
|
| https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/
| https://www.xach.com/rpw3/articles/
| bordercases wrote:
| The thought process and conversations that produced the code
| give insight into how to more generally produce code of that
| kind. Typically code currently in use is in continuity with
| code that was previously used, either as a system dependency
| or conceptual dependency. So it's still useful to have
| history around, like it would be to have comments in current
| code.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Do you know about cuneiform? Lots of what is known are just
| ledgers and exercise books...
|
| Never forget that we do not know the future.
| jedberg wrote:
| For the same reason we don't just tear down the pyramids and
| build condos there.
|
| There are still interesting things to be learned from ancient
| artifacts.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| But we do tear down old condos to build new ones. Should we
| also endeavor to retain every geocities and myspace page?
|
| And if not, what makes comp.lang more like the pyramids
| than geocities?
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Should we also endeavor to retain every geocities and
| myspace page?_
|
| Yes:
| https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities
|
| Digital data is not exclusionary in physical space like
| condos. And even random myspace pages with hacked
| stylesheets show the common culture of an era.
| jlokier wrote:
| Because it's a cultural artifact, of its time. It's history.
| And some people would like to be able to read it, or do other
| things with it.
|
| Personally I'd like to be able to link to my own posts from
| that time, for when people asked me what I used to do. But I
| can't find them any more.
|
| These groups are mostly not code. They are conversations,
| design discussions, ideological discussions, jokes, that sort
| of thing.
|
| Like what we have now in social media, except back then there
| was pretty much only Usenet, and it had a very different feel
| than the current social networks.
|
| They are where things ideas like the smiley, and free and
| open source software, and utopian ideas of internet culture
| were developed. All the early internet memes. And of course
| all the knowledge people shared.
|
| Conducted in public at the time and thought to be archived
| for the long term.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Wonder what people will think in a hundred years when they
| read that everyone believed the universe was made up almost
| entirely of invisible and intangible matter? It'll be some
| future generation's flat earth joke.
| rolph wrote:
| why do mennonites and other such groups use low/deprecated
| technologies? partially due to religious creed, but also
| because when the electricity is gone, oil lamps still
| function, and horses dont need a petrol pump to keep running.
|
| likewise many people are clinging to the local operating
| system rather than moving to the SAAS model.
|
| so what happens if we lose the oldschool languages and
| platforms entirely, for whatever reason ?
|
| if TBTF corporations are somehow hobbled or neutralized, we
| need old hand tools to build a tech newtopia from the rubble.
| if those tools are destroyed then we are beholden to a system
| that stands on very thin ice.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I would add to this that not all forward progress is
| necessarily good or well thought out. If there is value in
| an old thing that hasn't been unlocked yet, and it is lost
| to history, we become collectively worse for wear. Things
| like Lisp are old and pretty darn cool to have as an
| option.
|
| I second the need to rebuild from the rubble is often
| overlooked, especially by corporations driven by profit
| centered goals.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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/
| ornxka wrote:
| As someone else pointed out, losing information is bad
| because we can't know what value it might have in the future,
| only what value it has to us today. A lot of things from the
| past that we are certain had no value to people at the time
| (such as literal garbage heaps) are of immense value to
| historians today in understanding the past and the context
| within which those "worthless" things existed.
|
| You're right though that a decision will probably have to be
| made at some point about what to keep and what to toss (how
| big is YouTube, exactly? Are we really going to keep every
| video, in its original resolution, forever?), but this is
| just plaintext, it takes up almost no space. The decision
| doesn't even have to be made, since it's easy to find the
| means to store this, so why bother making it? Kicking the can
| down the road is actually the best decision in this case,
| since the people of the future will (hopefully) have a
| clearer understanding about what was important in our own
| past than we do currently.
| sgillen wrote:
| Well I think it's ok in general for some information to be
| lost, but I think a lot of HN users value this specific
| information.
| johnfn wrote:
| Why should we preserve old websites that no one uses? Why
| bother with historical documentation at all?
|
| It's because, at the time, you don't know what information is
| going to be important and what is just garbage. Documents
| that are apparently useless today could become fascinating
| tomorrow.
| Zenst wrote:
| Future digital tourism.
|
| That or risk future archaeologists thinking COBOL was some
| God of the time and the natives built large metal obelisks in
| dedicated worship temples.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The usenet archives should really be made public
|
| Given the nature of Usenet, they were if anyone wanted them.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Google acquired probably the biggest searchable archive, Deja
| News. What we needed was some kind of self-sustaining org
| with a strict charter to preserve the archive no matter what.
| mjevans wrote:
| Archive.org ?
| wahern wrote:
| Various people sent their old tape reels and other backups to
| Deja News, which compiled everything. But Deja News never
| made freely available the individual archives or the
| collection, nor did Google. The oldest stuff is locked away
| by Google because the only hard copy was destroyed when sent
| to Deja News. As time wore on most of the remaining fragments
| that at one point could have been recompiled independently
| also disappeared.
|
| What Google is doing by refusing to publish the archive or
| even share it with parties like the Internet Archive is
| completely unjustifiable and anathema to everything they once
| stood for.
| pfortuny wrote:
| They were until they were not.
| Havoc wrote:
| 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.
| haecceity wrote:
| So Google Groups archives usenet stuff? Where are the usenet
| stuff hosted originally? How do I connect to it without Google
| Groups?
| icedchai wrote:
| Back in the old days (mid 90's and earlier), most universities
| and large corporations had their own Usenet servers. These
| peered with other servers, either over the Internet with NNTP,
| or through older protocols like UUCP using modems.
|
| I had a UUCP news feed from a local internet provider when I
| was in high school, back in 1993 or so.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Like we have whitewashing and greenwashing, I propose the term:
|
| Googlewashing - to proclaim "Google would never ..."
| est31 wrote:
| There are laws for book publishers, requiring that they send
| copies to your local government's central library. In the US
| it's the library of congress. Some of the books they don't
| keep, but they do filter them by which books are important and
| which aren't. Maybe the same should be done for "viral" posts,
| such arial scans, and other data deemed important.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| In Germany the national library is also required by law to
| take care of digital ("korperlose Werke") media.
|
| They are still figuring out what a good way for archival of
| those is and are quite selective in choice what they archive,
| but they plan to expand on that
|
| German page: https://www.dnb.de/DE/Sammlungen/DigitaleSammlun
| gen/dgitaleS... English page: https://www.dnb.de/EN/Sammlunge
| n/DigitaleSammlungen/dgitaleS...
| wahern wrote:
| Electronic works in the U.S. fall within the mandatory
| deposit statute, but then are excused by Copyright Office
| administrative rules. However, it seems they've slightly
| narrowed the electronic works exception (first in 2010, and
| tentatively for 2020) since the last time I looked:
| https://www.copyright.gov/rulemaking/ebookdeposit/
| tingletech wrote:
| I didn't know that LoC has any discretion regarding keeping
| items mandatorily deposited for copyright registration. Do
| you have more information on this?
| irrational wrote:
| Isn't killing projects Google's key strength?
| jeffbee wrote:
| The USGS is currently in the middle of an 8-year 1.1-billion-
| dollar program to develop a nationwide digital elevation model
| from aerial lidar. The data, which is freely accessible, is
| hosted on AWS. Cute story though. The hackernewses are going to
| eat it up.
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/3dep/3dep-data...
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| USGS is in the process of collecting that data right now,
| it's not from the archives, and DEM is different from USGS
| aerials (which are photographs) and run out of a different
| USGS office. This is sort of irrelevant.
|
| Making digital data publicly available is pretty new for
| USGS. Just a few years ago archived aerial imagery had to be
| ordered by mail and it was a pretty lengthy process. Topo
| maps (the earlier equivalent of the DEM data to which you
| refer) were generally ordered on paper as well up to five or
| so years ago, but they're in a lot more popular use so more
| third parties got into the business of distributing them.
| I've relied moderately heavily on both for some of my
| research and was a _very_ painful process until just recently
| to get anything older than current. In the meantime, yes,
| Google had it all at some point, but mostly stopped using it
| or providing it because they obtained better quality imagery.
|
| Fortunately USGS now has a slippy map for topo and an
| admittedly rather clunky ESRI query service for aerials.
| jeffbee wrote:
| USGS has been providing free public access to DEM data for
| ages. The SRTM has been available via FTP since at least 15
| years ago when I first started using it to render
| hillshaded maps. There's not a secret handshake needed.
|
| https://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm/version2_1/
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| and the DEM has always been in a native digital format.
| The whole problem here is that the aerials and
| conventional maps are not, they're on paper and film and
| fiche. It takes a lot of time and money to get it
| digitized and available and USGS was not able to do that
| for a long time. You could argue that Google's generous
| offer to digitize the EROS archives contributed to the
| delays on this.
|
| Keep in mind that when we talk about the EROS archives
| we're talking about data that goes back to the 1930s and
| earlier for some product types.
|
| For a long time I got the topo maps from the website of a
| state government bureau that had conveniently run them
| through their own large-format scanner and posted the
| TIFFs - USGS didn't get around to it for years after.
| It's hard to blame them too much as they had a shoestring
| budget.
|
| Actually, for amusement value, that state agency appears
| to have removed the TIFFs from their website and now says
| that you can order the topo maps by mail for $8 a piece,
| which is what I used to have to do. I wonder if USGS got
| mad at them, which is a bit ironic since they don't
| mention that USGS themselves only recently started
| offering them online for free. For additional amusement
| value EarthExplorer, the fairly new service that lets you
| retrieve aerials online, has a banner up that downloads
| are intermittently broken and indeed I can't get it to
| work at the moment.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Really I'm struggling with your statement about digital
| distribution being new for the USGS. We're talking about
| an agency that ran a _finger_ service to inform people
| about recent earthquakes!
| widforss wrote:
| I had to order some maps over Antarctica by fax a year ago.
| The USGS had a functional webshop, but it only served the
| US, everybody else had to fill out this form including
| debit card data and send it over. It turned ou my uni
| actually still had one (1) functional fax machine.
| jedberg wrote:
| I took the tour 10 years ago. Obviously his objections were
| heard. I'm glad they listened to the guy.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Jeez, that's horrifying. Literally just giving public assets to
| private corporations.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Yea most of the wind about "taxpayer dollars being wasted" is
| just flatulence but this is a straight up robbery.
| blitmap wrote:
| I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have
| the same right to it that the rest of the public has.
|
| If the effort to USGS could be quantified in a cost, I'd
| expect Google to pay USGS to make the public data available?
|
| It does sound awful. I don't know what the right answer is.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| If getting it takes connections or prestige, then yes.
|
| If any entity with a plausible use case could and still can
| get that data at the cost of the copy, I don't see why not.
| The whole "copying does not deprive the original owner" meme
| applies particularly to such public assets.
| tingletech wrote:
| > But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their
| arial scans back to the USGS.
|
| That was poor negotiation by USGS Solicitor's Office. Libraries
| participating in google digitization programs negotiated to
| keep copies of their scanned materials in the Hathi Trust
| Digital Library https://www.hathitrust.org
| mywittyname wrote:
| You act like the Director of the USGS was acting in good
| faith. It's pretty likely that Eric Schmidt, or similar,
| already worked things out with high-level officials within
| the government and the USGS Director was not given any real
| decision making capabilities.
| elmo2you wrote:
| The underlying problem here might as well be considered a
| fundamental shortcoming of pure/fundamental capitalism. I make
| no claims about the value of alternatives, or even if there are
| any (better ones, that is).
|
| Anything that is (no longer) of commercial value will be
| "phased out" and dismantled/destroyed. One might still stretch
| it a bit, by arguing that the commercial value of something can
| include its future potential value. But I personally know not a
| single commercial companies that ever choose that over short
| term cost reductions and "profit optimizations".
|
| Luckily, there are governments who acknowledge this shortcoming
| and build structures to compensate for it. But when governments
| decide to leave (almost) everything to commercial markets, then
| the importance of anything and everything can and will only be
| measured by it's commercial (contemporary) value/profitability.
|
| People have every right to vote for and support such a system.
| But then don't complain, when all that you will get is only
| what such system supports/provides.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _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?_
|
| _Looks like he was a lot smarter than us._
|
| If you would've asked me back when Google was new, and we all
| believed in "Don't be Evil," I would never have thought that
| Big Tech would end up being the Ministry of Truth and The
| Memory Hole.
| ponker wrote:
| Companies are necessarily managed for the quarter and countries
| should be managed for the century.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The planet should be managed for the centuries, plural.
|
| But we're just not smart enough to understand that, never
| mind make it happen.
|
| Instead we prefer to cling to the bizarre delusion that
| billions of individuals with competing interests will somehow
| spontaneously self-organise into the best of all possible
| worlds.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| methodin wrote:
| Seems like a fundamental truth of Capitalism: privatization
| and ultimate destruction of anything that can be monetized.
| Certain things are impossible without money and to make money
| to have to generate or consume something which leads to a
| never-ending cycle.
| zrm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| _jal wrote:
| > like we need to build cutting edge decentralized
| applications
|
| Yes, please! More and faster.
|
| Centralized services are easy to build, because they
| offer an obvious location to do some of the things that
| are tricky to do in a distributed fashion. They are also,
| by the way, far easier to for small numbers of
| coordinating people to control, which makes them popular
| with corporations, authoritarians and sociopaths.
|
| Decentralized services will rarely be the New Shiny that
| attracts all the 14 year olds for a few minutes. But,
| unlike email, you never hear anyone whining that Myspace
| won't go away.
| freehunter wrote:
| We have tons of decentralized platforms. The amount is
| not the problem. The problem is the user experience. For
| users who don't care about anything behind the scenes and
| only cares about the experience, why would they go out of
| their way to figure out Mastodon when Facebook has a one-
| step signup process?
|
| The reason central platforms win is because they _have_
| to be dead simple to use in order to attract any users.
| Decentralized platforms get their initial users because
| of how cool the technology is, but those people (people
| like me and you) aren't UX experts and don't prioritize
| UX.
|
| It _has_ to be easier than the central platform, and the
| central platform has the benefit of millions /billions of
| dollars to throw at it. Which means the decentralized
| platforms have to work _even harder_ to overcome that.
| It's not impossible, but it does require engineers to
| overcome their desire to build cool things and instead
| focusing on building a user experience that's better than
| what Facebook /Twitter/etc can provide.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Joining a Mastodon server is just as simple as signing up
| to Facebook. The difference is that no single Mastodon
| instance has centralized control over their users; you
| always get the option of signing up elsewhere, or using
| your own instance.
| freehunter wrote:
| It's the "signing up elsewhere or using your own
| instance" that's the problem. You're joining _a_ Mastodon
| server and if you want to go to another server you have
| to actually move things. It takes actual effort.
|
| It seems like the Mastodon developers look at email and
| think "if it works for email it'll work here" and don't
| understand that people deal with email because they
| _have_ to, not because they _want_ to. I don't want to
| have to change my email address when I switch providers
| and I don't want to have to move all my stuff if my
| favorite Mastodon server decides to shut down.
|
| That's not a solution that's just another problem. It's
| bad user experience.
| MYEUHD wrote:
| >I don't have access to any of it because I need an
| Instagram account for that.
|
| Check out https://bibliogram.art
| JoblessWonder wrote:
| 502 Bad Gateway
| justaguyhere wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| A lot of ordinary people don't post in public, or if they
| do it's not under their real name, and there is a growing
| trend of deleting it after a few days. They don't want
| you to have any data about them at all.
|
| The modern alternative to Usenet is private Facebook
| groups that never get indexed.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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.
| Yhippa wrote:
| Counterpoint: does the average internet user want to
| download a new app or go visit a different website each
| time they want to get these updates?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If the websites bother to export RSS/ATOM/ActivityPub
| feeds, they won't need to. They'll just "subscribe" to
| the stream in their preferred app/webservice, and get
| aggregated updates about everyone they care about.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| The only thing that has improved is how easily a
| celebrity can reach millions
|
| From Wikipedia: Celebrity is a reference
| to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual
| or a group
|
| I'd posit that celebrities are celebrities by connecting
| with millions. A platform that offers a "celebrity" the
| ability to connect easily with millions seems to be worth
| more than a list of any other features.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| What has changed is the meaning of the word connected.
| clusterfish wrote:
| A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content
| on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are
| better for getting your content out to your followers and
| more people. They are being rational.
|
| Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that
| lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There
| isn't one.
|
| Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends /
| followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a
| standardized way?
|
| Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure
| out an alternative solution, but all we have are
| experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't
| have to be useful.
|
| Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but
| it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of
| beating them at our own game.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Why aren 't the social functionality of identity /
| friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers
| in a standardized way?_
|
| Because these compete with the interests of browser
| vendors, interests which finance a degree of development
| that dominates and ultimately stifles independent
| efforts.
|
| Remember that Google pitched Google+ as an "identity
| service". They're now accomplishing this through Android,
| Doubleclick, GA, Gmail, and ReCaptcha, far more
| effectively. And sell ads on it.
|
| Facebook isn't going to pay for social integration
| development by Mozilla: Zuck wants that pie to himself.
|
| Channel monopolies would prefer RSS died and browsers (or
| apps) served their specific feed directly and
| exclusively.
| Avicebron wrote:
| More often than not, the "game" trends toward market
| capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies.
| At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.
| zrm wrote:
| > Why aren't the social functionality of identity /
| friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers
| in a standardized way?
|
| Newsfeed is RSS/Atom.
|
| Identity / friends / followers are really one package,
| and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own,
| because people want the ability to do password resets
| etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the
| opposite of this anyway -- people don't _want_ to use the
| same "identity" for their parents and their friends and
| their boss.
|
| The best way to do this is for sites to use email as
| identity, because it's common and gives you password
| resets, but people can create more than one and separate
| them as they like.
|
| Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook
| and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent
| takes several hours to get running. Which we _could_ fix,
| but haven 't (yet).
| clusterfish wrote:
| Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in
| to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the
| browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat.
|
| RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other
| puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it
| doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article
| to your friends, etc.
| pbowyer wrote:
| > A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their
| content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those
| platforms are better for getting your content out to your
| followers and more people. They are being rational.
|
| I like trains, and I started a website back in 2001 for
| people to share their photos. It was reasonably popular.
| One of my drivers was taxonomy and archiving of images
| for future enthusiasts.
|
| Today, it's dead. People post their photos on Facebook
| groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that
| matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in
| the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no
| exposure. The comments - from people who worked on the
| railways, knew people involved - useful to historians of
| the future, are fantastic. But if you can't find them,
| what point?
|
| I get why Facebooks succeeded. For my site, I was a total
| geek: why would I dirty the site with anything social?
| Well, look who's laughing now.
| [deleted]
| nullc wrote:
| > It turns out that most pages created in the 90s are now
| inaccessible
|
| Some of that is because search engines have simply stopped
| returning them in results even though they're still online.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The issue is is that a web page only lasts as long as its
| funding does: private sites are great, but someone still has
| to pay for the server and, when they die, it's probably going
| to just vanish, unless the internet archive got it.
| opportune wrote:
| How are big corporations preventing a web server from serving
| content over HTTP in old-school HTML?
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I'd argue this is a feature not a bug. The internet is a
| protocol for communication, not archival or retention. Any
| notion of persistence is owned by nodes in the network.
| Retrieval from an "archive" over the internet comes in the
| form of communication. The web introduced hypertext, and a
| protocol for exchanging hypertext, on top of this
| communication protocol. But again any notion of persistence
| of hypertext, and the "links" between hypertext documents, is
| the responsibility of the nodes in the network.
|
| They were sharing information with the whole world, but in an
| ephemeral medium.
|
| The web, and internet, is not an inhospitable place for
| anyone without corporate backing. You can host a somewhat
| reliable service on a raspberry pi over your home internet
| connection.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Why do you feel that it was the job of "corporations" to
| preserve and archive of every page forever?
|
| In my country, all physical books and magazines which are
| published must be submitted to the government in X copies.
| The government then keeps an archive.
|
| With webpages, the problem of obtaining X copies never
| existed. Why couldn't the government have archived webpages
| like it always did with books?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It is not that it is their job. The problem is the mismatch
| between the broader public understanding of the lifetime of
| "a webpage" and reality, when said "webpage" is inside a
| walled silo (and maybe even when it isn't).
| colonwqbang wrote:
| I guess I don't see why anyone would expect their webpage
| to keep being published indefinitely with no contract or
| ongoing payment. Not many other things in the world work
| like that.
|
| Services provided by a company typically don't survive
| the end of the contract to provide that service. If the
| company itself goes bankrupt, all services cease to be
| provdided immediately.
|
| Typically the only organisations which can credibly
| commit to providing a service for more than a few
| years/decades is the government of a country, a well-
| funded foundation with a clearly specified mission, or
| similar.
| rikroots wrote:
| In the UK, this job is handled by the British Library. They
| have a legal duty to collect annual snapshots of all
| websites using the .uk TLD https://www.bl.uk/collection-
| guides/uk-web-archive
| [deleted]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Since when were Forth and Lisp historical programming
| languages??! People still use them. _HARUMPH!_
| fizixer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That isn't how it works, usenet is distributed, you can still
| access it using non-Google servers.
| bawana wrote:
| is google sinking? Between their mothballing/deletion of services
| and the obnoxious signup ads on youtube. I am wondering what is
| going on?
| gumby wrote:
| Basically neglect and boredom (I say this not an an accusatory
| way). They have a huge gusher of cash that comes in pretty much
| regardless of what they do, so there is no penalty if their
| focus slips. You see this in other companies with this
| "problem" like Valve. This also happens with monopolies-- note
| that standard oil made more money _after_ being broken up than
| before that happened.
|
| In google's case you can see this boredom on Android, on the
| number of products announced and casually killed (they might be
| excellent standalone products but can't move the needle on
| earnings for the benefit of Wall Street so why bother?).
|
| Contrast this to early Intel in the Grove era: they were on top
| of the world with the memory business so they pivoted to
| something else. Google has had the same two products for almost
| 20 years. The later Intel has been more like that.
|
| Another contrast: they don't know what to do about the
| advertising downturn, so are cutting back on hiring and such,
| while FB is trying to double down.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| No they've just secured their kingdom enough that they can do
| whatever they want.
| wegs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| bawolff wrote:
| Maybe these types of historical archives can be turned over to
| internet archive. I trust them a lot more than google for this.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| Either this archive exists elsewhere, either now is not the
| proper time for panic -- it was when Google became sole owner of
| this archive.
| totalforge wrote:
| SELF FOOT SHOOT DUP
| zentiggr wrote:
| Or Factor style,
|
| [ SELF FOOT SHOOT ] 1000 REP
| astrobe_ wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| BEGIN ME FUCK AGAIN
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