Why Google+ Failed • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#201

Post by hangonhn » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

"That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how "

I've never worked at Google but am friends with many Googlers. Someone I know was one of these awful company man manager who worked there would just keep defending G+ with these awful spoon fed comments. I stopped bothering trying to say anything about it since it became obvious that the group think has set. He's doing great at Google these days from what I can tell from his LinkedIn profile. I guess the culture has really changed if those are the Googlers who get promoted.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#202

Post by ablation » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

acheron wrote: post #187

ablation wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have Facebook, and all of these needs for connectivity are taken care of by WhatsApp group chats, essentially. It feels far more intimate and immediate than Facebook ever did too.

"I don't use Facebook, I use [thing that is also Facebook]" is not a hugely compelling argument. While "buy out your competitors" is not exactly a supergenius-level strategy, it is amazing how well it's worked out for FB.

I was talking about the functionality aspect, I apologise if that wasn't clear enough in my initial post. I don't miss any functionality that Facebook offers because WhatsApp effectively does away with things I don't care about by providing me with highly curated groups of conversation and sharing, without the cruft.

I am fully aware it's a part of the Facebook ecosystem.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#203

Post by cesarb » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #51

jrockway wrote: post #35

The ranking system did kind of annoy me. We used G+ heavily inside of Google, and lots of interesting people posted interesting things. As time wore on, I felt like I got less and less of that stuff. A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link. I followed them. They followed me. The post had 300 +1s. But I could never see i…

I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds blogged on it (eg. dead link https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY... about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there (assuming a big name won'…

> but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?

I might be misremembering, but wasn't the decision to completely kill Google+ made soon after a Google+ bug exposing account data was revealed (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-bug-expos...)? Given how integrated Google+ was with the rest of Google, keeping it alive, even in read-only mode, could be a security risk even for unrelated Google services.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#204

Post by comicjk » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

Redoubts wrote: post #126

trevize1138 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. I know a few friend were hopeful that Google+ meant they would no longer see posts from their racist uncle or gullible aunt. Start out with that same kind of exclusivity and hopefully it builds this exclusive mystique so when you open it up to everybody you get a flood. Perhaps the…

> Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. It wasn't just that. At the beginning, you had to be at an Ivy League. And that was the problem, G+ was invite only among a bunch of nerds, whereas FB was invite only among people who network for a living.

I don't think the nerd/Ivy distinction you're making is significant. Most students at Ivy League schools are nerds, at least by the standards of broader society (you need good grades to get in). Few of them "network for a living."

If anything, the real distinction is that a network for college students is appealing to teenagers, who are the perfect audience for social media. A network for adults doesn't draw in this crowd.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#205

Post by Eug894 » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

Isn't it funny that people still don't use a messenger with decent filters, which assess personal ratings of posters to show you more relevant results first? Even Discourse doesn't have personal blacklists. Though its search is more advanced than Reddit's. Isn't that strange in 2019?

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#206

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.

Something about this rings true.

it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#207

Post by reallydude » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #174

dredmorbius wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a frequently-repeated view, but I find it completely implausible. A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal. That might be compelling content, compelling connections, or a mix of the two. A cultivated and exclusive club, as with the Haevard Facebook, or early Usenet, has appeal. It's the…

> I find it completely implausible. I disagree and think it's 100% the reason it failed. > A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal. But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't. And since a social network is only useful if all your friends are on it, people never got into the habit o…

> The excitement was gone.

Most people didn't hear about it. You can ask people on the street. They sure know facebook. Excitement is not a good way to motivate people to move platforms, in general (despite the niche cases like Fyre Festival which are relatively small). Maybe they should have gotten some celebrity support? Otherwise the excitement wasn't mainstream. G+ needed mainstream users.

> But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't

That doesnt explain the lack of participation a year later. Nobody wanted G+ because they didn't need it. Even if it gave some benefit (which it couldn't) it didn't join with their existing Social Media data making a higher barrier.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#208

Post by jfarmer » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #197

oneshot908 wrote: post #157

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open cul…

Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball. Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

I took `oneshot908 as saying that the Google+ team had a broadly isolationist attitude. Their distance from both co-workers / potential internal contributors and customers/users was a reflection of this and that trickled down into poor product decisions.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#209

Post by CondensedBrain » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

wbl wrote: post #173

el_programmador wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMail's time was different, there was a lot less competition among web services back then.

At the time Gmail launched there were a bunch of mail services.

GMail was different in a number of ways.

1. Exponentially more space in a market where single or double digit megabytes was the norm. GMail's original pitch was that you never had to delete an email, and that you could always find them with search.

2. It was one of the first web apps. It was dynamic in a way few sites were then. Asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and Web 2.0 were still new concepts.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#210

Post by dekhn » Thu, Jun 20, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

vharuck wrote: post #190

dekhn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

camels are amazing creatures that are more useful than horses in a wide range of situations.

That's the point of the adage. The hypothetical committee was supposed to come up with a fast animal to ride (horse). But then everyone wanted it to address their specific concern. In the end, they created something good in many situations (camel), but at the cost of the overall gaol.

At best horses can run just a bit faster than camels, while camels are far more useful for a wide range of situations. I think the committee out-did the horse.