And Google Groups makes usenet (what you're *actually* reading) suck
royally. Google Groups has a broken interface. On usenet it's
customary to quote what you are replying to; on Google Groups you have
to hit "options" then "reply" to do this, rather than use the obvious
"reply" button. Quote, then trim away any excess, then put your reply
below what you've quoted (or intersperse reply and quoting, if
appropriate). This makes it easy to follow the conversation,

And the reason this is important is that Google does not actually host the
whole service and it does not reside on Google's servers (well, it does,
along with hundreds of others). Messages are exchanged among servers and do
not reach every server at the same time or in the right order. At any
moment, some readers of any thread are going to be missing some of the most
recent messages in it.

If Google ran the whole thing, everybody would be looking at Google's
server, which would always have all the messages in the right order. But
Google doesn't own Usenet, much as it would like to. Usenet dates back to
the 1970s and Google Groups is just one way to get access to it.