On: Why did Usenet fail?

[senko]

It's even worse than that.

Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish).

Edit: see https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.goo...

[thrashh → senko]

Umm according to Wikipedia, Deja News was turning into a shopping site, going bankrupt and shutting down the Usenet archive.

So Google came in and saved it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News

[jghn → thrashh]

Yeah. At the time I remember the sentiment being more "woah, this is amazing" and less "boo, corporate overlords taking over".

[senko → jghn]

Google was pretty much considered the "good guys" back then. It only started with AdWords a year earlier and was barely breaking even at the time. Loong way from "corporate overlords".

[anigbrowl → jghn]

Yeah, and then they let it sink as they have with so many other cool things they built.

[bentcorner → anigbrowl]

It certainly smacks of being someone's promo project where they moved on to other things after the migration and the project fizzled out without leadership.

[jhallenworld → senko]

It's even worse than that... USENET was one of the places that Google used to seed its search engine. Links from USENET were high quality links.

It's like reddit as the source for LLMs today.

So Google neglecting USENET could be about preventing competitors.