# Google Groups

6 Hacker News commenters recommended Google Groups and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as an easy way to share announcements and as a searchable archive of Usenet-style discussions. Critics often raise privacy concerns and legitimate messages wrongly marked as spam.

## Why people recommend it

- Searchable archive of old discussions (2 comments): "suddenly you could search comp.lang.whatever and usually find someone who'd asked" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47200767)) "google groups solved it for example" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987444))

## What people warn about

- Privacy concerns, surveillance business model (2 comments): "it’s not the most privacy-minded solution" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921509)) "All centralized proprietary surveillance capitalism products, and no decentralized/FOSS options." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396325))
- Google kills or absorbs older communities (3 comments): "google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432439)) "This is exactly what they tried to do with Usenet via Google Groups." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143246)) "within a couple of years it'd turned into Google Groups" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662245))
- Google drops services and withholds data (2 comments): "And then axed Google Groups and refused to release the data." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671243)) "Google has had memory loss." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47661596))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Discourse](https://hackerapproved.com/p/discourse.md): 35 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://accounts.google.com/v3/signin/identifier?continue=https://groups.google.com/&followup=https://groups.google.com/&osid=1&passive=1209600&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin&dsh=S-232799747:1793623793299575)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Google Groups", https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-groups/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).