I'm waiting for a Twitter video platform to settle these issues once and for all ... Google really needs more competition where users feel they are forced to do things because they have no choice.
That would be awesome.
Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
191–200 of 282 posts
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? It's the same sodding data, passed to the same company, how does merging two accounts that they already know are linked change anything? Also, you can search without logging in, and sign up for as many different email accounts as you want. Are you honestly saying that google asking you to make a G+ account is a serious problem for activists?
The accounts weren't "already linked". They shared some metadata. I was asked if I wanted to link them. I responded "no". Multiple times. Persisting when someone says "no" is at best, disrespect, at worst abuse and, in the right contexts, rape. Oh, did I mention I'd organized an ad-hoc anti-harassment policy discussion on G+ at the suggestion of Yonatan Zunger? Irony, it's got an enduring entertainment value. Oddly e…
> Persisting when someone says "no" is at best, disrespect, at worst abuse and, in the right contexts, rape.
I'm not sure I can continue to debate the problems of linking multiple google products together when a comparison is rape. Instead I'm simply going to repeat my original statement
> I genuinely find the level of complaints embarrassing.
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I define friend as someone I'd invite over to my house. Those are the people I interact with on social networking sites and send YouTube links to. Discussion forums are, socially, a very different thing than hanging out with friends, even though they both involve people and saying things. That's what I think HN collectively misses when talking about Google+ or Facebook; they think those are Internet Discussion Forums…
> You have to understand that very few people are willing to write this much on the Internet for public consumption by total strangers -- we are very unusual people Seems you're a bit out of touch with "usual people" - or at least "usual people" under the age of 35. I do agree HNers are unusual, but if anything I would say they are more likely to be concerned with what they share publicly, not less .
You've missed the point entirely. That comment was about the nature of the content posted. Facebook, snapchat, et al are essentially click-click-clicking through pages heavy on visual stimulation and interacting through short bursts of text, now video and images too. HN is about reading and formulating arguments and exchanging walls of text in an environment completely free of visual distraction.
The type of person who tends towards HN will be different from the type of person who tends towards something like Snapchat on the above grounds.
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#194Don't be silly; that would violate the 'do not discuss this topic' order...
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#195The current crop of Youtube commentors are the target of this purge, not collateral damage. Big G's high$$ advertisers aren't interested in being associated with free-form comments.
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another thing Google hasn't quite figured out, nor have any of the other big players in this space (Maybe Microsoft will, under a new CEO). They have to commit to being conglomerates, not platforms (not at a user visible layer at least). They need to run a multi-brand strategy or these troubles will only get bigger as user communities get more diverse. Interconnecting all offerings of such a huge diversified…
> 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 n…
I've had nothing buy a joyous experience there. Spam? Don't add spam to your activity feed. Just remove it from your circles, gone. An intern built it? It's one of the most finely crafted, expensive looking pieces of social software that has ever been built.
Excuse me but what the hell is this fantasy about Google plus? I'm not convinced that Reader was shut down and that Google plus was meant to be its replacement, the products are just far too different. I don't know where or why that rumour started other than to suggest maybe it was born of this same ridiculous hate fantasy.
Maybe I'm Google's target demographic but every complaint I've seen stems from absolutely refusing to allow Google to change anything. And a flamboyant hate for a product they refuse to use no matter what, which is a very carefully designed and free social product.
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#197I 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…
> One thought about real names: what does your contacts database look like on your phone?
So my phone book is identical to a public identity, is it? Just because most people have contacts by their full name in their phone book, it means that everyone should use their full name publicly at all times and on all occasions? Because that's what you're saying.
I don't know about your country, but in the Netherlands this is why we have privacy laws. It's legal to have a calendar with birthdates which your family and guests see; it's legal to keep a phonebook full of personally identifiable data, but it's illegal to share either of those with any audience.
Note that, yes, that makes every Dutch person with the Facebook app conducting illegal activities. But it kind of sucks to sue all your friends for uploading your info, so nobody does it.
(Also, the answer to your question is: a mixed list of first names, full names, nicknames, and first name + nicknames.)
> Maybe what people want is a unique identifier that only they know, and then choose to share a different name with different groups of people?
Exactly, and that's what I'm doing. I don't have that many identities, but yeah I've got two or three that I share with different audiences. Everyone in that audience knows me by "lucb1e" and I even own a domain lucb1e.com. If I wanted anyone in that public audience to know me in any other way, I would have used another name. I don't want to use my full name. My full name isn't even a unique identifier and it's much longer than my nickname. In my opinion, full names are pretty useless most of the time.
Even my Facebook account has no full name, and people seem to know and recognize me just fine, even though I know many of them in real life (and they also know my full name).
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#198I don't get what all the fuss is all about. Why would you want to hide your identity unless you are writing something crappy or being a troll on Youtube or Play Store. A single sign-on service is a great decision and that't the way things should be when you have multiple services from same company. You guys don't mind using all services like Spotify, Quora etc that are so closely tied up with Facebook login. But when…
"Why would you want to hide your identity unless you are writing something crappy"
Yeah like if you are Mexican and you made a comment online about drug cartels, and then you were disemboweled and strung up from a bridge as a warning to others.
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly, I don't trust enough to believe they won't change this in the future, or even that they're telling the truth now. Tracking people is the only way Google makes any money.
Agreed. I recently discovered that they even track you when using incognito. e.g. I got a youtube suggestion whilst in incognito that I had searched for 2 weeks prior & the type of search precludes the possibility of it being a co-incidence. So much for no cookies in incognito...
Incognito mode doesn't block cookies, it creates a separate cookiejar. If you have the same incognito session open for two weeks, every cookie from every site you visited still exists. If you want cookie-clearing behavior, you'll have to periodically close your incognito window.
Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes sense to have a single sign-on system (although this also raises questions of privacy over what actions are tracked and recorded by Google - I'm guessing evrything possible is tracked and recorded). Why doesn't Google provide a dashboard for all their services accessible from every Google service when you're signed in? The Dashboard presents all of Google's services with the ability to opt-in to additional s…
https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard may be what you're looking for.
WTF !?
I see on the dashboard I now can "manage my devices", click on it and ... get something like "Authorize the manager to use geolocation data" with _only_ an accept button.
I can't even say No ! This is way out of line. They lost it. It's not mismanagement, it's concious dark pattern all over the place. It rubs me the very wrong way.