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Why Google+ Failed

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Re: Why Google+ Failed

#261

Post by johnnycab »

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.

Thanks for providing a great insight. I kept away from Google+ due to it's initial aggressiveness of opting in and linking it across other services. There was already a growing disillusionment around investing time and effort into various concepts, which ended up getting culled[1]. It was Google Reader, which made me realise not to take any Google service for granted or rely on them long-term and only use them in a disposable format.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#262

Post by tannhaeuser »

the-rc wrote: post #220
tannhaeuser wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As dredmorbius posted, the content is going to live on at the Internet Archive just fine (Google could maybe redirect to them, don't they?). Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publis…

What IA is doing is their business. I don't see Google linking or redirecting to them ever, for many reasons: security, (mostly) opening themselves to litigation from random users, etc. Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of…

Fair points, but I guess I'm just puzzled how we've come to be fascinated by the business and technical side of Google+'s demise more than being worried about loosing almost all digital history of our times (not with Google+ specifically ;). Rendering HTML in web browsers seems like a problem solved 25 years ago, and so does authoring and server-side rendering (eg. SGML can pull metadata and compose fragments out of databases or whatever you want). But the 2010's have, I dunno, "educated" us to see script-heavy approaches and "platforms" as progress when in reality they're anything but, neither technically, nor from the PoV of author independence, nor for publisher syndication, nor for readers suffering through ads and tracking. Maybe dynamic content is the first we're going to loose, so with a 2010's media blackout, in 2035 we'll all be wondering what this decade was like.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#263

Post by iamnotacrook »

jfarmer wrote: post #208
unreal37 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt it. There's just no connection between them at all. Think about all the bad things you read about Amazon - how Bozo treats people, how employees are treated, especially the warehouse staff, plus a website the HTML hairdressers love to hate on. It's still the first choice for retail and cloud services for millions of people around the world. Separate cafeteria! I love Hacker News!

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#264

Post by hyperman1 »

zippergz wrote: post #213
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…

I hate responding to anecdata with anecdata, but my experience is that Real Names was a HUGE DEAL in a very small and specific sector of the internet (some of which has clear overlap with HN), and an absolute non-story in the rest of the world. I worked at G at that time also, and while I agree that Real Names was a dumb decision, at the time I did not see any direct impact on interest or engagement from my friends b…

For me, the real names debacle was a wake up call that too much of my online life depended on Google. What if using a new product caused my email to disappear without any recourse? What if Google subscribed me for something I didn't need or care for, then wiped out my digital life because of it?

I was interested in google+, but it wasn't worth the risk. This was also the point where I stopped playing with new Google stuff, and started logging in only for email, and logging out.

Now there is no way for Google to know all this, so I assume I got classified under the 'no big deal' group in your analysis.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#265

Post by ultraluminous »

bduerst wrote: post #235
znpy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was an IC6 at Google IC6 meaning... ?

Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority. Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.

The GP is providing their personal insider view regarding what they perceived as mismanagement of G+, and is starting of with describing the vantage the had at the time. There are many (many) instances of appeal-to-authority on HN, but this is just plain `ol context.

Apologies if I read too much into your comment, but Appeal to Authority is a name of a logical fallacy and ascribes some sort of intellectual failure to the poster, when there's clearly none.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#266

Post by inlined »

I was there at Google when G+ launched. I think there were a few other initial issues that prevented it from landing:

1. The real name policy was draconian. Leadership didn’t listen to internal or external outcries for far too long.

2. The team leaned into “circles” and a strange permission model even over usability. E.g. rather than posting to someone’s wall, you posted to your own and set the viewing permission to that person.

3. Circles were frankly a chore to manage.

4. The network was seeded with too homogenous a network. Google employees were given first access and then could invite two people. The result was a network that was too highly concentrated with tech bros at official launch.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#267

Post by acdha »

I think there's another angle to the feedback loop: they pushed everyone in the world into Google+ with no thought about notification quality or even how to handle abuse. Most of the notifications — which were displayed on every Google property — were noise (“ who asked about your Craigslist post 10 years ago just joined Google+!”, “Someone you never heard of added you to their ‘open source’ circle”) and it took months before there was a way for those not to generate push notifications in the iOS app.

By the time they started doing basic UX work most people I knew had already either uninstalled it or been trained to ignore it.

Killing Google Reader was a similarly poorly-considered move: they forced people to leave a system which had frequent high-quality interactions into something which was the exact opposite, and didn't even do basic QA testing on mobile for several months. Since Reader was disproportionately popular with people like journalists, the family go-to IT people, etc. the first impression many people got was “don't bother”.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#268

Post by asdf21 »

It's legit just not caring about customers.

- Want to keep using RSS? Fuck you.

- Want to keep using Google Wave? Fuck you.

- Want support on your adsense account? Lol, nope.

- Account got banned or limited inappropriately? Fuck you.

- Want to keep your YouTube and Google accounts separate? Fuck you.

- Want to get your domain whitelisted in Gmail? Fuck you.

I could go on and on..

They simply do not care about their customers.

Re: Why Google+ Failed

#269

Post by slouch »

zrobotics wrote: post #86
skybrian wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, even Facebook's "successful" model is kind of a failure because it encourages people to spam all their friends and relatives with crappy memes. It seems like a better model should somehow encourage people to think about their audience and post what they would appreciate.

So similar to IRC. As much as I hate their desktop client, Discord is actually ticking all the right boxes for what I want out of social media. Ironically one of these things: broadcasting specific things to specific groups, is something G+ tried to do. If I see an interesting paper, I don't want to share that on FB and have my grandmother making confused comments. But I do have a discord channel w/ some college frie…

I like this. I'm a Discord user with no real life friends on the service interacting with me, but I'd love to be able to suggest channels that don't exist on the WordPress server I use.
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