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Google+ broke our trust

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101–110 of 251 posts

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#101
post #92

To change status quo you need to provide enough value to motivate that change: Google Search: Search experience was completely disrupted. Since that moment people could focus on what they needed (no disturbing ads) and be more efficient. Gmail: Google innovated and simplified a lot email experience. You can easily measure the importance of Gmail to people by the importance of Gmail to the Google brand. Chrome: As an…

Facebook needed to be disrupted, but unfortunately the main way Facebook needed (and needs) to be disrupted is in compartmentalising sharing better, and while Circles accomplishes some of that, Googles real name policy pisses all over it.

As a user of Facebook and Linkedin I'm only moderately happy with the experience but I can't see myself changing soon. I would be happy to change to one social network that could "compartmentalize sharing better" (using your words) and be used for both social and work issues. If they could add some twitter functionality would be a plus. Is not efficient using different platforms all the time, would be easier to have one platform with different "modes".

There is plenty of space to disrupt the market but the status quo here is very strong. The problem is not if somebody changes or not, the problem is that everybody needs to change in mass or the network will be useless.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#102
post #20

That's a lot of counterhate. Not wholly unwarranted, but severely one-sided. Corporate products are not for dissidents or the privacy-focused. Period. The end. You need to find alts designed to be private and/or pay to not be subsidized for the profitizing of YOU - whoever you are or want to be. Google wants to fold you into their walled garden by tilting all their products towards each other. Shocking. I can't think…

A lot of this hate presumably stems from Google's "Don't be evil". Google has been given a lot of trust. They then demonstrated very clearly that they can't be trusted to care at all, and are prepared to go as far as putting users lives at risk over users names.

> Also, part of force g+ is what you are seeing grow widely. Enough people are harmed or disgusted with the level of gaming of anonymity that the trolls have achieved that the real identity movement has grown pretty quickly.

So give people options to block people who don't use a real name (but realise that for the vast majority of G+ users you have no idea if they use their real name vs. just use a name that sounds real enough to not get flagged by Google) from being able to comment on your posts. That would address the concern of people who have a problem with anonymous or pseudonymous posts, without forcing such a policy on other subsets of users where it in many cases is a problem. Trans users and political dissidents is just a couple of the worst affected.

There are many sub-cultures where handles are more common than real name - there are hundreds of people I would recognize by handle, from e.g. the demo scene, musicians/artists, but where I would not have clue who they are if going by their "real" name.

> I doubt large corporate interests will be able to find it profitable, over any minimally significant span of time, to preserve privacy and be a platform for social change/justice.

For this reason, I expect we'll soon enough find that companies targeting certain groups of countries, like the EU, will eventually find themselves facing legal restrictions on demanding/publicizing real names on the grounds that it is deeply discriminatory against certain classes of people. I'd expect trans groups to eventually go after that if it starts becoming too difficult to use products and services without a legally recognized name.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#103
post #87

A suggestion for Google to save itself regarding G+: Donate some of its engineers' time to fix and revitalize Diaspora -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29 -- or one of its peers or something along its original vision. It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook, give users their privacy back, and by releasing the source code, could role back its role in maintaining the code or policing…

I agree that would be cool, but I don't think Diaspora offers anything compelling to the general public. What fraction of FB users actually care that much about privacy?

By the amount of stuff I cannot see on a public profile pages lately and the amount of hidden friendslists - quite a lot in my somewhat diverse circle of friends.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#105

What made Google special in the past was having principles and walking the talk. Those days when Altavista wanted to force people into watching noisy pop up advertisements with annoying colors before you could search anything, and this small company decided to just display text. The days when everybody was onto portals to make the web enclosed inside gatekeepers hand and Google brought freedom. Those days are over. J…

As I say until people get sick of hearing it, google had:

1) principles and respect for its users, 2) great mathematical chops, and 3) clean UI.

1) is gone, and everybody has 2) and 3) now. Other than a moral center Google has never offered me anything that I couldn't get somewhere else. At least then, before alternate providers were driven out of business.

Right now, I have DDG as my moral search engine. Hopefully, one day, there will be a place for moral email or social.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#106
post #67
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't, that would be stupid of Google to sell that as it would be a one time sale. Google holds that data and has advertisers come to them, and pay them to make sure their products are seen by the people interested in related products. And the same thing next week. And the same thing the week after. The more information Google has on you to more accurately correlate your interests, the more valuable the data is a…

In other words, user data is not for sale.

It is for sale. Just not in the way you thought it was.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#107
post #87

A suggestion for Google to save itself regarding G+: Donate some of its engineers' time to fix and revitalize Diaspora -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29 -- or one of its peers or something along its original vision. It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook, give users their privacy back, and by releasing the source code, could role back its role in maintaining the code or policing…

I agree that would be cool, but I don't think Diaspora offers anything compelling to the general public. What fraction of FB users actually care that much about privacy?

In my experience, amongst non-technical people, around 95%. Amongst techies? A strong 20%.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#108
post #73

Google is interesting. Choc full of academically bright people, yet collectively dumb as fuck. Shame there is not a phd for common sense or being down to Earth.

Can you name one organization of 50,000 people that is collectively smart?

Large markets are very smart.

Smart is not necessarily nice. Without nice, incremental returns to smart may be negative. Furthermore, the terminal goal of a market is to give some group exactly what it wants. Such groups are often large, and their wants are defined by how their members act -- usually when others are not looking. A market does not care what anyone says they want.

It's a wonder the damn things aren't banned.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#109
post #4

As an intensive user, everywhere on Google products, I feel the Microsoftization. This includes documentation with corporate jargon, the bloated and confusing Hangout fiasco, the frustrating way to connect multiple identities together. Did they hire any corporate UX/UI/branding/marketing/documentation guys from Redmond recently, after Larry Page's CEOship?

It's an inescapable reality: companies grow and grow bloated and complacent. It happened to IBM and Microsoft, it happened to Google and it's happening now for Facebook. Once corporate mentality sets in the company's soul is gone.

My theory is that it involves excessively mediated reality. When Google was two guys, most of the people they talked to were not Google people. Now, my guess is that 95% of their conversations are with people they pay. Those people are more likely to tell them good things than bad things. And those people also think Google is pretty swell, because these who don't leave Google. And at Larry and Sergey's level, they probably aren't within three layers of external reality.

There's a diagnostic term: Acquired Situational Narcissism[1]. Basically, when a celebrity spends all their time around people who act like the celebrity is the most important person in the world, then they too start to believe it. I think there's a corporate version of that.

Imagine it: You created Google. You can buy anything. Everybody you spend time around defers to you. Of course you'd think you could do a better job of designing a social network than Facebook; half of humanity thinks that. The problem is that people will now let you do that.

Once you've done it, your very mediated reality makes it hard to know you've screwed up. Because everybody you talk to needs you to like them. Most of those people have gotten promoted a number of times, meaning they are very good at being liked by their bosses. And who doesn't like good news, especially about a pet project?

I'm not sure it's inescapable, but it certainly is the very common outcome.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism#Acquired_situational...

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that would be cool, but I don't think Diaspora offers anything compelling to the general public. What fraction of FB users actually care that much about privacy?

In my experience, amongst non-technical people, around 95%. Amongst techies? A strong 20%.

If that was accurate 95% of people would have stopped using Facebook when the NSA's wiretapping was uncovered. Last I checked Facebook hasn't missed a beat
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