I've read somewhere that Google extensively uses mailing lists internally. They’re probably using the same codebase for their internal mailing lists, and the storage costs effectively nothing to them.

Google groups works fine for internal groups. It's used to group users for gsuite and Google cloud administration. Its an essential IAM building block.

Public groups is just one aspect google groups, probably not the most important use case.

> And yet it persists.

That's a great point, and I would add that when Google launched Google Groups, there was this widespread concern that Google would abuse it to kill Usenet and force users to switch to its own walled garden.

Since then, Google already tried and failed to launch a couple of social networks, but Usenet is still around.

It’s not that much different. I was on Usenet from the late 80s till the web ate it. It was more like stack exchange and Reddit. But with far far fewer people involved. abpe was the best place for porn. Slash fiction was coming of age. Memes didn’t quite exist yet because posting images was not a thing. It the egos and attitudes were the same.

I think newsgroups would struggle to survive and be useful if they would get a massive wide adoption like social networks do. It would just be impossible to filter out useful stuff and avoid spam. They worked ages ago because the internet was a smaller place, and they still work today because the number of people who use them has not increased by much (sorry, no source to back that up)

It's not a scam.

No way Paypal or GooglePay would allow such a thing longer than a few hours, just enough for their own crawling engine, intented to automate verification of compliance to their policies, to ring the alarm bell on the screen of a human operator.

No way also a scammer would be dumb enough to use such services which require extensive verification process, with ID, proof of incorporation and so on...

It's just FBI, DEA or whatever, 'sting' operations. Like the kind of website where you can buy Red Sulfurous from somewhere in eastern europe countries(for example bellarus), but when you make a Whois of the website, it leads straight to an obscure hosting company located in... California.

The reason they asking minimum $150 (or even more on some website) order is because they want to use it as an argument in court to prove your intentions were to resell it, no matter if it's true or not, in order to force you to take a plea deal and send you in jail for 3-10 years and ruin your life forever.

Why do they do such thing when there is so much real real shit, in every sense of the word, going through mexican border ? Because it allows them to improve their stats on the back of idiots or naive young people who don't know were else to go.

There is a shitload of reports of orther similar false flag operations from US LE regarding 'terrorists', 'sexual predators', and on and on.

Just take a look at https://www.sugardaddy.com/ for example... This site promotes with no other possible interpretation prostitution, while presenting it as something else than prostitution, and while prostitution, to my knowledge, is forbidden everywhere in America. This site has been up for years (I know about it because Bill Maher made a joke about it years ago). The worse is you export your methods to other parts of the world (look at the bottom of the page) (UK, Australia, Canada, where prostitution is forbidden). But funnily enough (do I dare say?) New Zeeland, one of the rare country (if not the only one) were prostition is legal and regulated, is not represented at the bottom of the site.

A few days ago, there was a post here about an article regarding 'testilying' from police officers in court.

It's no wonder so much american people don't trust their government and accumulate tons of gun to defend themself from it... just in case.

There is something rotten in the Kingdom of the United State of America.

Yeah, I mean, there's a reason there was eg. comp.lang.c++.moderated already like twenty years ago.

Moderated ones are just a bit better

No. I mean technically yes but this wouldn't solve the actual problem: mass human communication at scale.

Usenet was a decent shot at this problem but it lost to other solutions. Yes, all the current solutions are pretty bad but they aren't worse than Usenet. In particular Usenet had zero spam protection, Google stewardship or not.

The "Usenet" you remember has been gone for years. Usenet to most people now means a place to download unlicensed videos with a remarkably byzantine and inefficient encoding and obfuscation system.

Google Groups is not USENET, it is irrelevant as far as USENET goes. Google Groups only access USENET.

Do a search for Free USENET and many will come up with instructions how to access without Google Groups.

"Can we even go back to Usenet without Google Groups?"

No. Any group that doesn't have some kind of pre-post vetting idiom is going to have spam and abuse problems.

This wasn't always the case and I can't pinpoint exactly when the change happened or what it was.

Oh how I wish this to become true!

Usenet is still pretty alive for warez, and people pay providers for access.

Technically it's simple, but I don't think anyone is willing to pay for the required infrastructure. Nor is it going to be used a lot.

Please yes. And while we are it, bring back Deja News too!

Usenet works differently.

Moderated groups are their own category and quite rare. Every post to them has to be pre-approved.

The large majority of groups (including comp.lang.c) are unmoderated. "Moderator inaction" isn't a thing here because moderation isn't even technically possible.

The group selection the spammers target seems really strange, alt.comp.freeware is another example.

Not sure I understand what they're trying to achieve.

(I tried to raise the issue internally, fwiw).

Blank lines separate paragraphs, they don't create blank lines. But also, indent with 2 spaces for code formatting: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc