How Google fucked up USENET

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

How Google fucked up USENET (newsgroups):

Replying to a post somehow doesn’t quote the original post, resulting in a lot of posts like this:
Yes! Totally! Good idea
No, that’s incorrect. It’s actually ment for something else
etc.

In other words.. a total loss of context. EACH message I checked which didn’t quote context was posted using Google Newsgroups. Some try to blame this on the users, but I cannot agree. A user interface should make it clean and as easy as possible to do the correct thing. Google newsgroups obviously doesn’t do that.

I used to use Google newsgroups for a while until they put version 2 (still Beta, like every other Google ‘product’ out there) up. They got rid of the tree view, fixed-width fonts, correct replying, etc. Essentially, they made it a blog-style commenting system, and I hate them for it because it also attracts blog-style commenting users. Google’s latest Newsgroups version also removes the ability to detect cross-posted messages; a common trolling technique. On top of that, they hide any quoted context that’s too long, so that for any ten messages you read, you’ll have to perform about six clicks in order to get some context.

(PS: Yes, I’m aware that most of the things I’ve complained about can be changed using preferences. However, I’m not about to let google, a company that makes all its money from advertising, place cookies on my computer. Next to that, most people don’t take the time to change their settings, resulting in more annoyances for me (for instance, in the case of quoting context) )

As far as I’m concerned, this makes google even worse than Microsoft. So far, I’ve always been able to avoid Microsoft’s products if I didn’t like them. This, however, I can’t ignore because the articles will still show up on USENET.

I hate google.