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Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

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Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#21

Post by icebraining »

orev wrote: post #6
neic wrote: post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

Before, people knew those were fleeting, and so they knew they had to record them if they wished to keep them.

Current platforms give an idea of permanence, so people stopped worrying about preserving what they care about, and when one closes both are lost.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#22

Post by cydonian_monk »

And the shutdown seems to be fuzzy, because I can still post to Google+, +1 things, and presumably do other usual G+ things despite it telling me it's shutdown. Now I'm only occasionally reloading to watch my follower count drop as things get deleted.

I still feel the early variant of + with the original implementation of Circles (back in 2012) was one of the most useful takes on social sharing I've come across. And it worked especially well for photographers. Once they moved everybody to Collections I stopped using it with any regularity, and stuck mostly to groups/Communities. Hitching YouTube to it was basically the last straw. When I made a farewell post last month it had been about four years since my previous completely-Public post.

The platform had flaws, and I'm a bit sad to see it go, but I won't particularly miss it.

Cheers,

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#23

Post by flatline »

creato wrote: post #17
neic wrote: post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

I've been surprised that there hasn't been much pushback/questioning (from what I've seen) on this archive effort. Of course people voluntarily published the information here. But they also had at least a little control over how and what was presented to the world. Now they don't. Is archive team going to respond if someone finds something in the archive they want to take down? Is there a listing somewhere of exactly…

I find it curious and saddening that this is becoming an expectation. Someone voluntarily publishes something for the world to see - they are certainly within their rights to issue a retraction, but they have long since relinquished control over others’ actions with the data they published. This is pretty fundamental to how the internet works. The fact that there is now an expectation of continued control over said data just shows how far companies like Facebook have gone toward fundamentally changing the nature of the internet.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#24

Post by adrusi »

orev wrote: post #6
neic wrote: post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

Historically, information was more likely to be saved by accident. If something was published in print, that means that copies of it were distributed nationally or globally, found in hundreds of homes or libraries. If the publisher went out of business, people would still have physical publications lying around. And if something came to be of historical interest 50 years later, it could be preserved forever. If a web publication or community goes out of business, where's that data going to be 50 years later?

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#25

Post by lostphilosopher »

orev wrote: post #6
neic wrote: post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

Three additional reasons:

We don't necessarily know what's "important" in advance.

Archiving this content can be a nice public service for people who put content on the internet, don't do a good enough job preserving it themselves, and then want to access it later. I've heard "check the wayback machine" as a solution on HN for people whose blog got taken down unexpectedly from some provider and they didn't have a back up solution.

Perhaps the same as the first reason, but some of this content can turn out to be useful as evidence. It's not uncommon for public figures to take down unflattering messages they posted on social media platforms and then deny having ever made them.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#26

Post by sebthedev »

flatline wrote: post #23
creato wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been surprised that there hasn't been much pushback/questioning (from what I've seen) on this archive effort. Of course people voluntarily published the information here. But they also had at least a little control over how and what was presented to the world. Now they don't. Is archive team going to respond if someone finds something in the archive they want to take down? Is there a listing somewhere of exactly…

I find it curious and saddening that this is becoming an expectation. Someone voluntarily publishes something for the world to see - they are certainly within their rights to issue a retraction, but they have long since relinquished control over others’ actions with the data they published. This is pretty fundamental to how the internet works. The fact that there is now an expectation of continued control over said d…

Under many data privacy laws, data subjects have a legal "right to correct" any inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.

GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#27

Post by anticensor »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

My Google+ notifications were more active than they have been in months as everyone was checking in to see how much longer was left. Google didn't specify the time of the shutdown, just "sometime on April 2nd", so none of us were sure when the cutoff would be. Middle of the day, as it turns out.

Yes, the last day was probably the most active period of Google+.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#28

Post by bunderbunder »

flatline wrote: post #23
creato wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been surprised that there hasn't been much pushback/questioning (from what I've seen) on this archive effort. Of course people voluntarily published the information here. But they also had at least a little control over how and what was presented to the world. Now they don't. Is archive team going to respond if someone finds something in the archive they want to take down? Is there a listing somewhere of exactly…

I find it curious and saddening that this is becoming an expectation. Someone voluntarily publishes something for the world to see - they are certainly within their rights to issue a retraction, but they have long since relinquished control over others’ actions with the data they published. This is pretty fundamental to how the internet works. The fact that there is now an expectation of continued control over said d…

The internet was created in a different age. The kinds of abuses people are worrying about right now were barely even possible when the Internet was created. Now they're quite feasible using relatively inexpensive and well-known technology, and people who are eager to share the knowledge of how to do it have created all sorts of MOOCs and bootcamps and even accredited degree programs on the subject.

Re: Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

#29

Post by vorpalhex »

orev wrote: post #6
neic wrote: post #3

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can thi…

Crazy person trying to save everything on the Internet here (at least, a few sections of it.)

It was actually when the Trump administration basically gutted and removed the whole of the EPA's website that caused me to take notice. I realized that while my written notes from a decade ago were still around and usable, every digital note I'd made more than a year or two ago was gone.

Our knowledge culture has changed from memorizing facts to knowing how to get to facts. Information also no longer flows down from a "chosen few" who have the means to publish, but instead from everyone at just about all times.

Archiving is also no longer a horrifically complicated or expensive hobby. There's no reprinting books on archive paper or storing them in helium. Instead you can simply buy a stack of hard drives and start bulk storing data.

Since getting involved, I've come to realize that data goes offline frequently, with no warning - extensively due to bad copyright claims. I can't really fix the copyright process (at least, not very quickly), but I can help save the data and help make it available to others in meaningful formats.

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