What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

14 points by legohorizons 1 year ago | 18 comments

hey everyone, been thinking a lot about where all the good convos are happening these days. like, im pretty young and grew up on reddit/twitter for programming stuff, but now im tryna do more serious work and cant find the right spots for it??

watched that node documentary recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB8KwiiUGy0) and was surprised to see familiar faces like @Rauch on early node google groups. now twitter is just ai and teens and getting annoying.

saw this article about mailing lists (https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/) and got me thinking. seems like all the good ideas are stuck in these walled gardens now - mastodon, twitter, github discussions, farcaster channels, etc. not only is it politically siloed, but places like discord/slack are just totally underindexed.

what happened to google groups? do ppl miss it? are there any real open alternatives? whos working on this stuff?

where's the serious, nuanced work happening in 2024 and beyond? explain whats going on to someone to young to be born into what seemed like a more vibrant era of google groups and usenet.

google groups seems to have turned into some admin tool for GCP rather than a place for real discussions. anyone else feeling this or am i just being nostalgic for something i never even experienced lol

thoughts? experiences? where do you all go for the good stuff these days?

al_borland 1 year ago |

When I was in college it was all about forums. I belonged to many, and it was my favorite era of the internet. There were people I talked to everyday for a decade, and formed many real life friendships as a result.

Facebook and Reddit really killed forums. Some our still around, but most are a shell of what they once were. The ones I was really involved in all shutdown after members started to spend more and more time on Facebook.

HN is really my only outlet anymore. I was on Digg until v4, then spent many years on Reddit, but it never had a sense of actual community. Reddit also became intolerable quite a while ago; I haven’t been there in a couple years.

It feels a bit sad to say, but the collapse of forums left a hole in my life and I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to find someone to fill it.

Sorry I don’t have many helpful suggestions, but I can tell you you’re not alone. I think the formation of these mega sites really hurt the internet. When sites reach a certain size the individual disappears and users all blend together.

davkan 1 year ago | |

I joined a car forum a couple years ago and it was like a blast from the past. An actual community on the internet. People acting with respect generally, active and reasonable moderation, full control of the platform. Users coming together for a shared interest and knowledge but also just a hangout for like minded people to socialize. Plenty of people meeting up in real life, well known members who passed memorialized and getting long threads of how peoples lives were touched.

It really just made me remember what the internet used to be. Reddit (or any modern site) has almost none of that. The only sub of mine I can think of that remotely had a vibe of a community of people, not just users, was r/eve and that’s only because it’s a small portal into an existing insular community of 20 years.

Niche and hyper specific hobby forums that serve as wealths of information like car model forums seem to be doing ok and absolutely dwarf their Reddit sub counterparts in volume of posts. It could be due to internet searches driving users with narrow search parameters towards the wealth of old content in those forums that Reddit could not hope to surpass? But we’re not getting any new forums of that type. New niches get subreddits and any sub that grows out of complete obscurity will be subsumed into the larger Reddit culture and lose its uniqueness and community.

ManlyBread 1 year ago | | |

Reddit suffers greatly from the lack of quality moderation. The moderators on reddit remove spam or off-topic submissions but more than often leave low effort or just worthless threads up, which in turn invites more people to post similar content.

My favorite example of this is the /r/snes subreddit where most of the new posts seem to be photos of the games someone bought off somewhere. I've never seen anything like this on any old-style forums outside of a thread dedicated solely to this kind of thing.

palata 1 year ago |

I think good communities exist, but it's not necessarily easy to find them. Some comment here mentions USENET, and I think it was from a different time, where there was a very strong filter based on who joins Internet communities (only a specific subset of people were doing that). Now pretty much everyone does. It's probably easy to find a community of Taylor Swift's fans because there are so many, harder to find a niche community.

The hard thing, IMO, is that it's also very hard to promote those communities to the people who would fit. If a community is over-advertised, then many people will join and alter it, maybe destroying it (say you have this nice community of mobile development that talks about Kotlin and Swift, and in a few weeks you get 3000% more users who all love PWAs... it won't be the same community anymore).

One could hope that algorithms would be very good at creating perfect communities of people who match with each other, but it's hard to say from history that social networks are good at that except for a few examples were they actually grouped together people with pretty radical opinions and it was not exactly great.

can3p 1 year ago |

I’ve been scratching my own itch lately trying to build a communication medium that I like.

IMO the problem with current social networks is their scale and public only approach. Any network that goes this way ends up with lots of bad actors and public only approach means that it’s easy to harass people and bots are economically viable.

I’ve addressed both points [0]. Visibility of the posts is limited to direct connections, you need a proxy connection to make a new one and at the same time it’s mega easy to import/export, markdown support and apis are there etc. That was my way to get miningful discussions back.

In general, you need to look to small scale places

[0]: https://github.com/can3p/pcom

deafpolygon 1 year ago |

I think, the "modern" equivalent is Discord. Unfortunately, it is what it is. mastodon, etc, tends to be popular for fringe / less mainstream politi-think.

> now im tryna do more serious work and cant find the right spots for it

you won't find /that much/ places for serious work - reddit certainly isn't it. twitter is definitely not.

scottedwards 1 year ago |

I feel your pain. I was lucky enough to be around to enjoy the days when the ONLY place online where people were discussing serious topics (and non-serious ones!) was USENET (and maybe The Well). Google Groups just started to throw a web interface on USENET.

Sadly, once big money entered the Web in the late 90's, every Portal popping up felt like they had to include discussions/message boards into their features.

Yahoo Groups was big in the day and is now essentially dead. Same with Facebook, etc.

Now everything is very fragmented. There are some really great discussions happening out there (metafilter.net is a good example) but they are hard to find.

Reddit might be the closest thing to a groups/USENET replacement that we have.

I'd love to hear about anything else out there that may save civil discourse, but I have my doubts it exists (or will). (although web3 may save us yet - nostr is pretty interesting)

After all, what does it mean when 90% of people spend their time on Instagram and Tiktok?

palata 1 year ago | |

> After all, what does it mean when 90% of people spend their time on Instagram and Tiktok?

I tend to think that the 10% remaining still represents more users than what USENET ever had. It's okay to not include everybody in a web community; I actually think it's a mistake to try to include everybody. Some people just don't fit (and would fit better somewhere else). Many times I read people saying "in order to attract more people you should do this and that", but I disagree: maybe you don't want to attract the people you wouldn't attract in the current state.

jazz_from_hell 1 year ago |

In general, the best online conversations I read/participate in take place on Slack.

palata 1 year ago | |

Do you mean some public communities that you join with a public invitation, or do you mean more private communities (like your company Slack)?

jazz_from_hell 1 year ago | | |

I mainly hang out in two Slack communities, both quite high-volume. The first one is public but regional (not in English), the other one is invite-only but quite big.

For people who want a nice place to hang out online, I can warmly recommend starting a Slack (”tenant”?). I’m kinda surprised that more people don’t try this. Mattermost or Discord might work too, but IMHO Slack still has the best UI for this. (The shortened retention sucks of course, but it’s still very useful.)

PaulHoule 1 year ago |

Try subject-specific forums like dpreviews.com, polyamory.com, coderanch.com, etc. Think about Quora but with 98% less enshittification.

legohorizons 1 year ago | |

Thats a good tip. I guess the question that brings up is solving the problem of discovering those communities that are still alive and thriving out there.

PaulHoule 1 year ago | | |

A friend of mine and I have been talking about ways to consolidate and improve online commenting. If you look up my profile and contact me about it I'd be glad to talk about it.