Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by stronglikedan » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

NoodleIncident wrote: post #48

stronglikedan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do find ironic about it? It's two entirely different types of discourse, so it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

A difference in the content of the two platforms doesn't mean that the comments on the two sites are so dissimilar that they can't be compared. In particular, they remove the forum requirement of quoting the comment you're replying to, by allowing you to respond to someone's comment directly below it in the middle of an existing thread. It would be exactly as inconvenient to readers of old Reddit and HN threads if th…

> doesn't mean that the comments on the two sites are so dissimilar that they can't be compared.

Actually, it does. I discuss things of significance here, where the information may be useful to someone in the future, but I only commented on reddit for entertainment purposes (jokes, witty remarks, etc.) Also, creepy people don't comb through past HN comments looking to call you out in current conversations like they frequently do on reddit, and almost always out of context and spun to fit their agenda. While entertaining, it started getting annoying after a while, so in my opinion, that's why they can't have nice things, so to speak.

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

#52

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:16 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #33

est31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? What seems unimportant and insignificant to us now might become very interesting in the future. People in the future might consider the arrival of the internet as the beginning of a new age. Furthermore, some things may seem obvious to a person born in our times, but might not be obvious to people born in the future. So many works,…

I'm less worried about the curiosity of people decades or centuries in the future than I am in the privacy interests of former Google+ users right now. Many of them chose that social network specifically because it was supposed to offer them better privacy protections. Which isn't a litmus test for whether or not they'd be OK with having their profile scraped and archived, but it is at least suggestive. It would be p…

The content IA are archiving was public and publicly accessible.

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

#53

Post by ForHackernews » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #11

orev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? What seems unimportant and insignificant to us now might become very interesting in the future. People in the future might consider the arrival of the internet as the beginning of a new age. Furthermore, some things may seem obvious to a person born in our times, but might not be obvious to people born in the future. So many works,…

It's always surprising to see how much relatively recent stuff is lost on https://www.lostmediawiki.com/

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

#54

Post by orev » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #21

orev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you look at the way most people use social media, they absolutely have no concept that they provide permanence. It’s exactly the opposite.

People saving images solely to Flickr or videos on YouTube is a different usage pattern than the ephemeral likes and comments they make on the social platforms.

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

#55

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

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…

The other side of this is for that the past centuries things that were on _paper_ (letters, photographs, newsletters, zines, personal notes/journals, whatever) could be just left sitting around, and _some_ portion of them would still be there and legible decades+ later for historical purposes.

When it's digital... if you don't keep feeding it, it's gone forever.

There has been some coverage of historians and archivists concerned about this, here's just the first random thing i found googling:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/digital-era-end-history/st...

But yes, professional archivists increasingly recognize you can't save _everything_ digital, we couldn't afford it. Figuring out what to save is a challenge. But if we save nothing, we're not gonna have much history to look at.

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

#56

Post by bunderbunder » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

bunderbunder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm less worried about the curiosity of people decades or centuries in the future than I am in the privacy interests of former Google+ users right now. Many of them chose that social network specifically because it was supposed to offer them better privacy protections. Which isn't a litmus test for whether or not they'd be OK with having their profile scraped and archived, but it is at least suggestive. It would be p…

The content IA are archiving was public and publicly accessible.

Well, for one, ArchiveTeam is unaffiliated with Internet Archive. Judging by the website, it's more closely associated with 4chan or Encyclopedia Dramatica or something.

For two, being public and publicly accessible doesn't mean it isn't gauche to scrape it. It's kind of like how nobody sticks a sign that says "take one only" over the bowl of mints at a restaurant; it's assumed you just know that it's not cool to stick a whole handful of them into your pocket.

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

#57

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #11

orev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? What seems unimportant and insignificant to us now might become very interesting in the future. People in the future might consider the arrival of the internet as the beginning of a new age. Furthermore, some things may seem obvious to a person born in our times, but might not be obvious to people born in the future. So many works,…

> What seems unimportant and insignificant to us now might become very interesting in the future.

Often this argument is used to try to justify things as important as mass-surveillance and as small as logging in a software project. “Just collect and retain everything, who knows what we’ll actually need!” With GDPR and increasing focus on massive & intrusive data collection, I think this mindset is going to have to change. Before deciding to preserve or collect information (particularly information of a personal nature, like social media accounts), you should be prepared to justify the activity. “It might be useful one day, maybe” shouldn’t be good enough.

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

#58

Post by Traster » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #49

sephoric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had room fulls of boxes of things that I thought might one day be important, or significant to someone. Then I realized, when I die, all those things are just going to be thrown away or donated to a thrift store, and it's highly unlikely that anyone who buys any of that will find the same value in it that I thought it had. If I have created anything truly timeless and worthwhile, then it had better be something I c…

Yeah, keeping physical things around does only make sense if it is actually valuable to someone. Archives only accept objects actually worthwhile of keeping. But it's different for digital content, as it's so much easier to store. At least for now. Also, Archaeologists love the garbage dumps and cesspits of old towns, literally the places where people put their least valuable things, because they weren't raided by ea…

Another way to look at this is that the more you store, the more difficult it is for people to actually find the valuable parts of what you've stored. One of the fascinating aspects of the internet is that our internet lives diverge so thoroughly from our offline lives - so the data we're leaving for the future is arguably horribly unrepresentative.

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

#59

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 1:10 AM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #56

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content IA are archiving was public and publicly accessible.

Well, for one, ArchiveTeam is unaffiliated with Internet Archive. Judging by the website, it's more closely associated with 4chan or Encyclopedia Dramatica or something. For two, being public and publicly accessible doesn't mean it isn't gauche to scrape it. It's kind of like how nobody sticks a sign that says "take one only" over the bowl of mints at a restaurant; it's assumed you just know that it's not cool to sti…

AT are not affiliated with IA, but work closely with them, and the data AT collects is transferred to IA. Therefore, my characterisation of the data as "archived by the Internet Archive" is substantively accurate.

IA aren't scraping the data themselves, but they're the customer.

As for your second point: there's merit to that argument, and I've discussed same previously -- I'm very much of mixed minds on this. A few considerations weigh strongly, however.

0. The data were already public, as noted.

1. The system shutdown was not a known factor when most of the data were created. The expectation at that time was that the data would continue to exist.

2. The shutdown itself has occurred in a context in which individuals, and far more importantly groups quite literally could not archive the relevant data themselves. Google's own Data Takeout, whilst fairly remarkable (in a positive sense) within the industry makes many things difficult or impossible. Ordinary users cannot archive Community content, and even Owner and Moderator roles within communities could only archive posts from public communities -- neither comments nor private communities were archiveable. (Third-party tools could provide these capabilties). Moreover, technically, cost, bandwidth, or storage-constrained users or communities largely had no viable options for saving their own legacies.

3. The contents sitting on Google+, indexed and searchable by content on both the site and via the public Web, were far more visible than they will be at the Internet Archive, which does not support full-text search of its archives (at least not yet), and which is not as effectively indexed publicly as Google+ was.

4. The Internet Archive does provide for content removal under the DMCA, as well as other mechanisms. For a G+ user, given how content URLs are constructed (they all include the user's G+ UUID as a common element), requesting removal of an entire tree is trivial.

On balance, this favours the Archive.

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

#60

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #11

orev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? What seems unimportant and insignificant to us now might become very interesting in the future. People in the future might consider the arrival of the internet as the beginning of a new age. Furthermore, some things may seem obvious to a person born in our times, but might not be obvious to people born in the future. So many works,…

It's ok to lose stuff. If we save everything, there will be too much stuff, only a fraction will ever be used. I'm not convinced of the value. Perhaps people should do their filtering, saving.