Google+ broke our trust

Agree 100%.

If history is any guide, major players will end up doing precisely that, eventually: setting up an industry-backed open consortium promoting some kind of application-layer protocol/stack built around Diaspora or any its peers [1,2,3,4,5,6]. That plus another round of 2011-like Facebook fatigue could very well induce the required phase transition. Who knows though: perhaps newer, leaner companies like Dropbox or GitHub would be more likely to take the lead instead.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Social_Networking_... (Defunct, apparently)

[3] http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ (!)

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial (This MySpace-era protocol is interesting because it was initially supported by Google)

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

I said:

> tracking via ads and embeds often enables the sites you visit to sustain themselves, and, even if you want to quibble about how "consensual" that is, is trivially mitigated via free, brain-dead-simple browser extensions

So I addressed both its existence and the fact that there are issues regarding just how "consensual" the practice is. I concede that perhaps I should have used a term other than "quibble".

> If it is to make a point, she shouldn't, or one might simply say she cannot have a rational discussion, because it simply doesn't prove anything.

One might say that, but I don't think that would delegitimatize her position at all. If someone seeks to be offended to avoid having to engage with the actual argument, that's on them, and they probably didn't need the pretense of caring about the insult to begin with.

> The question is: was it deliberate, or was it simply an error, or a misunderstanding? People make mistakes, that's unfortunate, but it's understandable.

The problems with google's approach have been pointed out almost immediately after their policy became known. If it was a simple mistake in the sense of an accident, it would have been corrected then. Google might not have set out to cause harm, but drafting their policies and sticking to them in contempt of the harm they are causing is a deliberate, voluntary move.

For a hamhanded car analogy, if someone parks in a parking space for the disabled out of laziness, and now some guy in a wheelchair has to cover another block's worth of distance because he had to park elsewhere, it's not okay just because they didn't do it to cause him harm, it's still bad because they didn't care enough about not causing him harm to avoid it. Something that hurts a disadvantaged group out of disregard for their needs rather than out of malice is still cause for offense and not just a mistake.

> In a different culture, it might well be the worse thing you could say to someone.

I think that's really unlikely. I might conjecture a hypothetical culture where insults are expected and polite, but I think it's sufficient to look at the actual cultural context. Correct me if I am missing something, but "jerkface" is the blandest, least serious insult I can think of. It doesn't invoke gross body parts, religion, sexual language, the subject's intelligence, morals, looks or status. In fact, I cannot imagine anyone using it without irony, going intentionally for a weak and childish insult.

> For a minor issue, that happened in _the title_, but I surely don't care that much.

Yeah, just to be clear, I didn't mean to complain that you started talking about the title, just that I needed so many words to respond.

> I like that YouTube comments now have real names on them. It makes them much less toxic.

Not sure what part of Youtube you're browsing but comment quality has not increased in any way with the real names policy from what I've seen. Just a lot of Google+ mentions embedded in comments now with the same asinine comments.

Using and loving G+ and Hangouts to this day. I like how easy it is to get a group chat or a video chat going in the browser, and I like the increased control over sharing I have, especially relative to FB. (I can even share with people who don't want to log in because they hate the service. My FB friends cannot.)

I'm trying to sift through the complaints to see if they're relevant to me, but haven't had much luck so far.

1. Everything

Complaints on the order of "it broke everything" just seem hyperbolic and silly.

2. Nymwars

I think they should allow pseudonyms, but I don't blame the company for trying build something tied a little tighter to real world identities after fighting a decade long war against fraud and spam behind the scenes. I feel like it's within their prerogative to say they're building an identity service, because pseudonym based logins are already widely available. Faulting them for that choice is a bit like saying you don't like Gmail because you think email is stupid.

3. YouTube

Among the other major complaints is that they broke YouTube comments, ie, the worst den of inane and offensive comments on the internet since 4chan. Good for them, the team deserves a medal.

Someone made a mashup just to illustrate the depravity of comments on the video site a few years ago: http://comments.thatsaspicymeatball.com/

4. Popularity

Probably the other tacit criticism is that Google launched a service that didn't immediately trounce all other social media sites, delivering everything for everyone. It's used by a mere 350 million people. It's been criticized for that number being only a third of its registered base, but that seems perfectly on track or better than estimates for other social media sites. Twitter's active userbase is probably roughly 20%, for example:

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-total-registered-user...

It's weird that a site with 350 million active monthly users is considered an embarrassing failure. I'm sure lots of services would be happy to trade userbases with G+.

It had a few cool features. It wasn't world changing. I feel like it hit some of the Segwey effect, a victim of its hype more than of its failings.

5. Aesthetics.

I feel this is the most inarguable complaint. Some people don't like the style of G+, don't like its approach to usability, or find its sharing system needlessly complex or confusing. By all means, these individuals should not use the service. I don't like the look and feel of Pinterest. I shouldn't use Pinterest. To each her own. I worry some authors subtly shift this argument from "I don't like the feel of it," or even, "My friends don't like it," to "It is a failure of design that no one should use." Seems a bit unfair.

I believe there are good usability guidelines, but I don't subscribe to the belief that there is a perfect one size fits all, that all implementations of any service will eventually converge to one platonic form. Competition is good because we all like different things, each find different styles more intuitive.

I'd be happy to consider other arguments, but so far allegations of the service's abject horribleness seem somewhat exaggerated.