Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 282 posts

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#41

Post by alayne »

jrockway wrote: post #34

I have no idea what the official party line is... but doesn't it make at least a little bit of sense to unify two social networks owned by the same company? One thought about real names: what does your contacts database look like on your phone? While I know a lot of people by their online handles, I also know their real name, and I typically choose to enter that real name into my phone. Maybe this is uncommon, but if…

Google has owned youtube for 7 years and this year they decided to mess with people. Why?

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#42

Post by xarball »

javert wrote: post #28
RodericDay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you were thinking when you added those interjections to every other sentence but this post is condescending as hell.

I didn't take it that way, for some reason. I interpreted them as friendly, and I thought they were helpful in making what I think is a very good point.

I write like that on occasion.

Pretty sure it's because my thought process isn't like a linear story. It's more like a series of contextually leveled bullets -- each inner statement adding some useful (albeit sometimes unnecessary!) information to the overall discourse.

I can assure you that people who write like that don't mean to be intimidating or rude. They're probably just trying to leave no gap unexplored! (Much like how programmers have to think!)

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#43

Post by jmillikin »

libovness wrote: post #35

Don't forget that one of the tacit reasons for G+'s existence is simply to have a reason to encourage G+ buttons on each page for further tracking of what's happening on the internet. Using a single identity helps to reconcile a unique user that help both the advertiser reach "uniques" and for Google to better understand that user's behavior. Back to the point: Google's ethos is to track and analyze as much of what's…

From https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1319578 :

  > The +1 button isn’t used to track your visits across the web.
  > Google doesn’t keep a persistent record of your browsing
  > history as part of the process of showing you a +1 button or
  > otherwise use the fact that you personally have visited a page
  > with the +1 button.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#44

Post by kissickas »

psbp wrote: post #26
nacs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite the opposite for me. I've started moving my stuff off of Google as this was one of the last straws in my book. I'd already switched to using DDG and Startpage for my searches and am currently in the process of moving my Google apps email to my own server. When that's done I plan on deleting my Youtube and Google accounts. This latest Google+ push has made me realize just how far Google is willing to go to…

I'm sorry, but hearing geeks talk about quitting google as if it's some personal triumph (in nearly every google thread) makes the sentiment seem even more tone deaf and futile.

I would be willing to bet that 90% of extremely upset users are using Adblock Plus anyway, and a smaller amount (though significant, in this crowd) use NoScript or something similar to block Google Analytics altogether. It would be basically impossible for Google to even notice their disappearance.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#45

Post by jrockway »

alayne wrote: post #41
jrockway wrote: post #34

I have no idea what the official party line is... but doesn't it make at least a little bit of sense to unify two social networks owned by the same company? One thought about real names: what does your contacts database look like on your phone? While I know a lot of people by their online handles, I also know their real name, and I typically choose to enter that real name into my phone. Maybe this is uncommon, but if…

Google has owned youtube for 7 years and this year they decided to mess with people. Why?

Probably a combination of: having the idea, having the right infrastructure, and having a team of engineers to write the code and migrate the data.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#46

Post by denzil_correa »

pavs wrote: post #24
nacs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite the opposite for me. I've started moving my stuff off of Google as this was one of the last straws in my book. I'd already switched to using DDG and Startpage for my searches and am currently in the process of moving my Google apps email to my own server. When that's done I plan on deleting my Youtube and Google accounts. This latest Google+ push has made me realize just how far Google is willing to go to…

You are not a target user for google products and services, thats why they are not too worried about how you or users like you feel about it. See also: Facebook. A lot of noise was made about facebook privacy (inside the HN and other tech eco chambers) and a lot of noise was made about people quitting facebook because of privacy. But in reality probably only .00000001% of facebook users probably quit because of priva…

> But in reality probably only .00000001% of facebook users probably quit because of privacy reasons, which is probably a drop in a bucket compare to the amount of new users they get everyday.

Normalization is a tricky job. Your assumption is that the entire set of users were aware of privacy problems with Facebook. Out of the universal set of Facebook users, there would be two subsets - people aware of privacy problems and their ill effects and people who don't. You should check "how many people quit (or significantly reduced activity on) Facebook, once they found out about privacy issues and their effects" and then report the percentage.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#47

Post by danbmil99 »

jmillikin wrote: post #30

Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system. Management's stated reasoning goes something like: * It's silly to force users to have separate accounts for Google services because most users would prefer to have Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Calendar, and so on under the same account/identity. * Users who want to have separate public identities will create pseudonymous "Pages" for each of their identitie…

You know a company has jumped shark when employees start explanations for their behavior with a phrase like "Management's stated reasoning goes something like:"

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

googlemployee1 wrote: post #6

I work pretty high up at Google, and I (obviously) made this account to post in this thread. Google is effectively "dead" in my opinion, and this mirrors (at least in my experience) the feelings of many of our other higher-ups who are concerned with technology rather than the business. Everything has stagnated, it's no longer fun to work here, and it's entirely about making money now. The claims that we don't bend ov…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#49

Post by alayne »

psbp wrote: post #26
nacs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite the opposite for me. I've started moving my stuff off of Google as this was one of the last straws in my book. I'd already switched to using DDG and Startpage for my searches and am currently in the process of moving my Google apps email to my own server. When that's done I plan on deleting my Youtube and Google accounts. This latest Google+ push has made me realize just how far Google is willing to go to…

I'm sorry, but hearing geeks talk about quitting google as if it's some personal triumph (in nearly every google thread) makes the sentiment seem even more tone deaf and futile.

Sometimes thought leaders need to light the way when issues are not apparent to the masses. I have been saying for a long time that having companies own our identities is a bad idea.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#50

Post by jmduke »

RodericDay wrote: post #21
jmduke wrote: post #4

So I don't work for Google and I've never worked for Google. I do, however, have two things you might want to keep in mind: 1. Google, according to Wikipedia, has 46,000 employees. The number of employees who are in a position to influence policy regarding Google+ adoption over the Google suite of products is likely less than one hundred (or .2%). It is entirely possible -- likely, even! -- that the other 99.8% of th…

I don't know what you were thinking when you added those interjections to every other sentence but this post is condescending as hell.

I honestly wasn't trying to be condescending, and apologize if it came off that way. (I'll leave the original post unedited so it doesn't look like you're crazy or anything.)

That being said, Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users? is an incredibly loaded question and I think my tone might have stemmed from that.

Post reply on HN