On: Why did Usenet fail?

[thrashh]

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.