james_nicoll

I suspect the crackpots that make usenet intolerable for me long predated this switch. :)

Ah, that neatly explains why bassoon showed up a few threads back.

I realized recently that if you follow the precept of "don't read the comments" that Usenet is all comments.

I noticed the other day that it barely functions in Chrome, which is odd, to say the least.

Why? Google is nothing if not inconsistent.

Except when it isn't.

Sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to archive it, yeah?

Deja News is just one of the many businesses Google purchased, and then never knew what to do with. Many of them are now run by bored interns, or so it seems.

Google has a metric buttload of the cream of the cream engineering talent (or so they say), but looking at Google's offerings and the state many of them are in... I'm not exactly sure what most of them are doing.

They bought DN for mining and seeding. They then made it available to everyone so they could say it was an act of historical preservation.

Thank you. That's just ... perfect.

The archives have never been great. Deja News was pretty good, but they took the liberty of not archiving some political groups they didn't like, which was very fortunate for people who had posted rotten things in, say, alt.politics.white-power under their real names and later came to regret it during job-huntin' time.

Google screwed them up pretty quickly, with posts disappearing consistently. Even after Wired embarrassed them a year or two ago, the Groups were not fixed.

Currently, Google has screwed up Blogger, Reader, and Groups that I know of; 'net searches are iffy, and seem to change every couple of weeks as though they're messing with the algorithms. No one I know ever talks about Google Plus except to ask if anyone uses Google Plus. I rarely see a + icon clicked on a website.

Whatever Google has been doing for the last year, they've been doing it wrong, and unless things change pretty soon I don't think they're going to weather these problems successfully.

Ah, but generations from now, people may still be googling ... and creating new explanations for how the word was born.

yes, not using tree threading is a real pain for complex usenet discussions.
And the new "pagination" sucks.