End of an Era: Google Groups to Drop Usenet Support

A social-networking fossil looks even more embedded in sedimentary rock now that Google plans to retire the Usenet gateway it’s maintained at its Google Groups site since 2001.

The news surfaced Thursday in a “Google Groups ending support for Usenet” post on the Groups help forum. “Starting on February 22, 2024, you can no longer use Google Groups (at groups.google.com) to post content to Usenet groups, subscribe to Usenet groups, or view new Usenet content,” the post advises. “You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups.”

Anybody who wants to stay current on Usenet will need to find a new client and network news transfer protocol server–the post advises Googling for help with those things–while the non-Usenet parts of Google Groups will remain as they are today.

For those of you thinking “Use-what?”, Usenet offered decentralized social networking starting in 1980, decades before “fediverse” became a 2023 buzzword. It consisted of a vast hierarchy of threaded forums called newsgroups, distributed via a store-and-forward architecture that had individual online services host their own copies of these forums.

This made Usenet open to people without full-fledged internet connectivity; AOL carried newsgroups before it added web browsing.

Back in the day, Usenet offered a range of user-generated content as vast and as weird as Reddit ever has, organized in a naming system that began with short top-level prefixes (for instance, “sci.” for science discussions) and then got more specific (as in, sci.space.history). 

Usenet’s strangest subdivision was its “alt.” hierarchy, which let anybody create a newsgroup and therefore contained such oddities as alt.pave.the.earth (people hypothesizing about covering the planet in blacktop) as well as alt.binaries.* file-sharing groups (in which people uploaded and downloaded MP3s years before Napster arrived).

Many of the social-media problems that remain unsolved today, like trolling and spam, surfaced decades earlier on Usenet. But Usenet’s ability to connect widely separated people with shared interests also sparked long-lived collaborative projects: The Internet Movie Database began on the rec.arts.movies newsgroup.

Google got into the Usenet business in 2001 when it bought the newsgroups side of DejaNews, which had developed a usable web front-end to Usenet that let people read and post in a browser instead of dedicated “newsreader” apps. 

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But by then, Usenet was already sinking under the weight of abusive or irrelevant posts that individual users struggled to control with filters in their own apps–an early case of content moderation tools proving inadequate to the task. 

In early 2000, I wrote a column for the Washington Post about the growing uselessness of many newsgroups in which I quoted one of Usenet’s developers, computer-science professor Steve Bellovin, shrugging off its possible demise: “Times and technologies change--20 years is a great run for anything.”

Almost 24 years later, that quote has held up better than Usenet.