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

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

#271

Post by dredmorbius »

moon_of_moon wrote: post #163

So really the only way to identify high quality information is by what some would call "peer reviewed, authenticated content". That means you know something about the person who generated the content and a bunch of people (who you also know something about) review it and vote it up. Thats why a large percentage of high ranked search results come from wikipedia and stack overflow/exchange and quora. LinkedIn and Faceb…

the only way to identify high quality information is by what some would call "peer reviewed, authenticated content".

That's not the only way.

It is a method that scales.

You can also identify content yourself, based on known sources (whether fully identified or pseudonymous), or based on the extant indicators within the text itself.

Traditionally the issue has been resolved through editors (not necessarily peer review) who would judge content on its merits and/or the reputation of its author(s). As Clay Shirkey has noted, "it's not information overload, it's filter failure", we've moved from pre-publication filters to post-publication filters. The incentives on and for publication have also shifted, with a huge increase in low-quality information being promoted (most of what's "viral"), something I'm increasingly getting sick of.

As for G+, as I've posted elsewhere (and Homer Slated points out very eloquently in a recent post), Google's formerly razor-sharp relevance algorithms are becoming increasingly vague. It's to the point it's becoming highly obvious to me, and it's very painfully manifested on G+ specifically.

Some of this might be attributed to SEO gaming of search, but tool design and selectin (see "What's Hot" and the extremely limited search and noise controls on G+) make me increasingly think it's deliberate.

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

#272

Post by voyou »

eonil wrote: post #203
voyou wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They want real personal information from real human." I don't understand why they would want that. The kind of analytics data you can get from a Google profile is much more useful to advertisers than vague demographic categories like age or location (I mean, you can guess at these categories from Google's data, but if you know that someone acts like a 23 year old woman from Austin, that's more useful for marketing p…

You're right. Nobody want approximated, imitated, false, or empty data. And you're wrong. Facebook data is not vague. People use Facebook to write about themselves . And to announce it to their friends . People don't lie to their friends. And that's the miracle of Facebook to marketers. People write truth on Facebook. Sheryl Sandberg knew it, so she didn't hesitate to get aboard. Unlike Facebook, Google data is poor.…

I think you underestimate how much Google knows about people. It seems to me that what you say is much less relevant to marketers than what you do, and in what you do, it's not obvious to me that Facebook has a big advantage.

On Facebook, you might fill in a field saying that you are married or that you have kids of a certain age. Google knows that you have made a number of searches about diaper price, or quality, or about using cloth diapers, and have spent time on, say, price comparison web sites or parenting forums. From this kind of Google data, advertisers would know to send you adverts emphasising the price of their diapers (rather than trying to sell you high quality, expensive, diapers), and they know this with more confidence than they could extrapolate from what you say on Facebook.

It's true that Facebook also has data about what you do (commenting and liking on particular updates and photos, for instance, and web traffic data from Like buttons on pages), but note that this doesn't depend, any more than Google's data depends, on the user being truthful about their own real-world identity.

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

#273

Post by joeldidit »

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…

The problem with this is that most users don't want their YouTube account linked with everything else. They aren't a minority.

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

#274

Post by acdha »

jmillikin wrote: post #267
acdha wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spam? Don't add spam to your activity feed. Just remove it from your circles, gone. For the first couple years, there was no way to avoid notification spam if, say, “Real Russian Pharama” added you to a circle. This included push notification spam for at least a year – they added a setting after ~6 months but it didn't actually work, requiring the iOS app to be uninstalled to stop it. > An intern built it? It's one…

> For the first couple years, there was no way to avoid > notification spam if, say, “Real Russian Pharama” added > you to a circle. Plus launched on September 20, 2011 -- that's just over two years old. The default notification setting changed from "everyone" to "extended circles" in October 2011, which blocked notifications when strangers mention you in a post. The default for being added to a circle is still to no…

> The default for being added to a circle is still to notify you regardless of whether you know the other party, which seems to match the behavior of most other social networks

This does not, however, generate a push notification to your phone as it did uncontrollably for much of Plus' history. Even after the setting was added to control this, it didn't work for a long time.

What this really came down to was the lack of prioritization: the follower model is closer to Twitter than Facebook, being very public oriented, so you're far more likely to receive notifications about complete strangers but the UI copied Facebook's notifications. This meant that most users were trained to ignore the notification bar on other Google properties for a long time as everyone they'd ever exchanged email with was pushed into the service. Anything more than casual testing would have made it obvious that they should have had a way to group notifications so e.g. replies wouldn't be flooded away and to prioritize "added you" less than "added you back".

> You might want to verify whether the behavior you're seeing is due to a misbehaving browser extension or user script.

Nope - vanilla Chrome on OS X (also Firefox, Safari and Opera). Similarly, even on iOS where you can't add user scripts at all, the touch scrolling is jerky and buggy, requiring a scroll/wait/scroll cycle to get it to scroll to the bottom of a comment thread.

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

#276

Post by scholia »

yapcguy wrote: post #260
scholia wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gundotra spent 15 years at Microsoft before joining Google. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra "Before joining Google, he was a general manager at Microsoft.[3] He joined Microsoft in 1991 and eventually became General Manager of Platform Evangelism. His duties included promoting Microsoft's APIs and platforms to independent developers and helping to develop a strategy for Windows Live online servic…

Maybe he never left Microsoft? Maybe his true mission is to keep tabs on Google and given the opportunity, create long-term strategic blunders?

No, but Google has quite a few ex-Microsoft staff. I wonder if they are able to get away with things at Google that they couldn't at Microsoft? ;-)

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

#277

Post by Havoc »

jmillikin wrote: post #199
Havoc wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was with a fresh incognito session, so theoretically there shouldn't be a cookie.

A bit more trial & error shows that its possibly connected via IP...switching IP seems to confuse it.

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

#278

Post by coldtea »

derscheister wrote: post #212
dredmorbius wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What kind of crazy idiot are you? Seriously? Rape? Slightly deranged or what?

Calling the other names for making a (non offensive to anyone in particular) remark, just because he used a notion your particular culture finds "taboo"?

Not to mention the irony of being offended by the mere use of the word "rape" (to correctly describe the feeling of being continuously probed after repeteadly saying "no", without trying to offend anyone), while in the same time you find it acceptable to comment on his mental state ("crazy idiot", "deranged" etc), as if mental health issues are funny.

Is that what you consider responsible behavior?

Or were you just conditioned to think people using the "r" word are to be prosecuted, however innocent and justified their use?

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

#279

Post by danbmil99 »

danbmil99 wrote: post #47
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:"

For the record, I was not meaning to criticize jmillikin's remark. Rather, the tone and phrasing of the remark made it quite clear (to me at least) that Google now has, at least in some quarters, gravitated towards the common and pedestrian situation where employees and management are intrinsically at odds with each other, operating from vastly different perspectives, and having to work hard to even maintain civility, having essentially lost respect for each other. Phrases such as "their stated reasoning goes like this" implies that their stated reasoning differs from their real reasons, and by further implication, their real reasons are either wholly misguided, delusional, capricious, evil, or some combination thereof.

It's just a far cry from "do no evil", and the tone is wholly different than what I heard from early G employees, back in what I respectfully have to consider their heyday.

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

#280

Post by danbmil99 »

jmillikin wrote: post #53
danbmil99 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:"

I believe that many internet flame wars are caused by inaccurate or imprecise statements. It is important to me to indicate the source and quality of information that I post. What would you have written?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6771148
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