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

> Who honestly talks to their friends via Youtube? It's really not a social networking site. People use it to enjoy watching videos and occasionally make a comment.

This is the heart of the matter, Google views Youtube differently than everyone else. We use it to watch videos, not to communicate with friends, and don't consider it a social network - when we want to discuss a video with our friends we share it with them.

Google wants you to discuss it with your friends on Youtube (or G+) instead of posting it to Facebook (or wherever) and discussing it with your friends there.

> It leads to idiotic decisions like killing Google Reader instead committing to serving a long tail of diverse communities.

Reader was even more significant than that: had they actually been trying to make Google+ a desirable service, first-class integration with Reader would have brought a large, very active core of G+ users to launch the new service.

Instead, they shipped something which had obviously had almost no effort attempted — I'd say they had an intern do it except that most interns take more pride in their work — with things like mobile support being completely broken for at least a year, flaky desktop support and forcing a disruptive unidirectional model where you could share to Google+ but not see what other people were sharing, comments, etc. which had been the core of the Reader experience. Forget fancy things like clustering shares of the same URL, simply appending a "#googlereader" hashtag would have made the experience far better.

Toss in all of the strategic mistakes like waiting a year or two before taking spam seriously or offering better control over push notifications than uninstalling the app and they basically trained all of their early adopters to see Google+ as an unrewarding, un-QAed mess of bugs and noise with very little signal.

This would have been bad in its own right but an almost comical stumble when you really how many journalists, bloggers and other influential people used Reader heavily, ensuring that future Google stories for years were going to have a heavy note of “How will Google will let you down or exploit you” instead of the “Here's why you want to use this” tone which was pervasive during the era when Google was focused on making products you'd voluntarily use.

When I looked at the Google+ account I didn't want or ask for, the default picture was from an Orkut account I signed up for on a lark before Google bought them.

I don't think some people in this thread understand that having something stored on the Internet, and having it be public, and having it to be tied to other public identities, and those identities being tied to your meatspace identity are four different questions.

> It's a much better product than Facebook.

It's slow and buggy (i.e. it jerks painfully while scrolling on modern touch devices, it's sluggish on the desktop even in Chrome and they broke spacebar scrolling!), the photo upload experience doesn't work as reliably, search is embarrassing for Google and the timeline still doesn't do basic things like clustering shares of the same item or sorting based on what you've found interesting.

When Google can't compete with Facebook on technical quality, you know it's because of a management decision rather than lack of technical resources.

> But a better social product means nothing without an active network of users.

Lots of people tried it but they just found a marginally QA-ed bug-fest for the first couple of years which was clearly designed with the top priority of providing Google's ad sales team with tons of data to compete with Facebook ads and building a quality product seen as a cost of getting that data rather than the actual goal.

That sounds entirely reasonable for the 99% use case - you have one convenient login, pseudonymous accounts on different services, and the only problem is that Google knows your accounts are the same person. Which they could almost certainly work out anyway from IP addresses etc. Your accounts are not safe from government snooping or unethical behaviour by Google - policy, or individual malicious sysadmins - but you are safer from harassment by other net users.

What we have in practice is people complaining that their real names and photos are appearing next to comments on their previously-psudonymous Youtube accounts. Google seem to have flubbed either their user-education, or the mechanical steps put on offer to find what people wanted for their accounts when the policy was rolled out.

I don't know what was offered to Youtube users - were they given warning of policy rollout? Clear pages of settings to adjust when they logged on? Was a 'page' containing their current Youtube identity in place by default? These would sound like reasonable steps to take to avoid an outcry.