Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

Posted Jul 28, 2020 16:44 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

This looks like ridiculous overreaction from some braindead automation. I thought Google was supposed to have the best AI in the world, but whenever they let that AI take any decisions that affect real people it seems to make disastrous mistakes, usually with no obvious human checking before disaster is inflicted and no recourse other than signal-boosting via the press, since Google always does this with no humans in the loop and no appeals procedure (not that it's clear who could be consulted in the case of historical archives!). This is... not a sensible way to work.

Deleting historical archives because of spam is even less sensible: it's not like more spam is going to materialize in the past history of comp.lang.lisp.

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

Posted Jul 28, 2020 17:51 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

I suspect that it's happening because Google Groups is two products merged together:

The old "dejanews" Usenet archives, which I'll call "Usenet" throughout this comment.
Google's in-house forum system, which I'll call "forum" throughout this comment.

It makes sense to remove entire forum groups which have always had a spam problem, and where the forum group owner isn't willing to use Google's tools to moderate it and keep it spam-free; after all, if you've created a forum group for the purpose of spamming, or if you simply gave up the moment spammers found you, there's probably not much non-spam in the group. This is doubly true since the tools have been there since the forum group was created, and advertised to you as the forum group creator; AIUI, Google has reached out to their owner of record for such forum groups and asked them to clean up, so anything left is something that nobody still cares about.

However, that analysis ignores Usenet. Usenet predates Google's spam handling tools (after all, it predates Google), and has never had good tools for dealing with spam problems. Further, because there's no creator or owner on Google's systems for any given Usenet group, there's no-one to reach out to, so there's no-one who can (e.g.) close the group to new posts and clean up history, like there is for forums. Thus, unlike with forum groups, Google has no way to contact someone and say "hey, this group is spammy, please fix".

All it takes is someone designing an AI setup to clean out forum groups that are zero signal, and then running it on both Usenet and forum groups to get into this situation; chances are high that nobody involved in this decision has even realised that the two things are different, because they've been merged together a long time ago.

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

Posted Jul 30, 2020 1:38 UTC (Thu) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] (3 responses)

> Usenet predates Google's spam handling tools

Usenet predates spam. There are still a few fogies (read: me) who remember the first spam. :-(

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

Posted Jul 30, 2020 16:47 UTC (Thu) by littoral (guest, #140523) [Link]

I remember it too, and it was from lawyers, IIRC. The same ad was on dozens of newsgroups, offering their services to help people immigrate to the US. Reminds me of an old joke that isn't really funny any more:
Man walks into bar and says loudly to the bartender: "Lawyers are assholes!".
Another man, sitting at the same bar, overhears the comment, turns round and says: "Hey, I resent that!".
The bartender, trying to calm things down, turns to the second man and asks politely, "Are you a lawyer, sir?"
The annoyed reply is:
"No!! I'm an asshole."

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

Posted Jul 30, 2020 22:45 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

I was tempted to write "me too" - but then I remembered the first time these AOLers showed up on our Usenet and started to pull down the signal-to-noise ratio significantly. For quite some time, I had "@aol.com" in my kill file.

IIRC, this was even before the first Spam posts by Serdir Argic et all. IMHO, Canter/Siegel are wrongly acknowledged to have sent the first spam on Usenet. I remember clearly that the Argic bot was more of a nuisance.

But, to my pleasure, with a good Usenet provider, it's back to usable today. I'm in Germany and use Individual.net and I'm happy with it. Since almost all lusers are now on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, it's almost back to the experience of the late 80s or early 90s - an exchange of geeks.

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

Posted Jul 31, 2020 19:49 UTC (Fri) by kmweber (guest, #114635) [Link]

Depends on how you define "spam" :)

Finn Brunton's *Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet* is a really good sociocultural history of spam that analyzes the interplay between spammers, spamfighters, and online communities writ large as both a sociological and a technological phenomenon.

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

Posted Jul 31, 2020 11:04 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Google doesn't have the best AI, only the most profitable. Their business model is “unfortunate externalities” all the way down, and has been pretty much since they bought DoubleClick.