Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers • Hacker News Board

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#301

Post by mcastillon » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

ma2rten wrote: post #297

_uhtu wrote: post #6

Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. Currently on Facebook the news feed is…

I disagree. I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air. However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate th…

It could be argued that by focusing on the wide release, they inherently doomed the product. Hard to build a cohesive community of 300M when the stickiness factor doesn't exist yet. Arguably would have been better to focus on limited releases on niche communities to create that stickiness/increase retention.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#302

Post by koolba » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

How (if at all) does this impact "Login with your Gmail" and those APIs? They started off separate but were subsequently combined into one common package.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#303

Post by Latteland » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #274

cpeterso wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like Google could have successfully built a "shadow social network" by incrementally integrating their popular services like Gmail, Inbox, Reader, YouTube, Hangouts, and chat into one portal. OTOH, Buzz tried to inject social sharing into Gmail and there was a big user backlash.

Absolutely - always thought this. I fail to see why Google+ was a discreet product at all.

I think this is exactly right. It would have been a lot better to organically build a social network across all their products that people actually like to use and comment on. Instead we force them to do things they didn't want to do like real names, but also constantly having to make decisions about what was public or not. It was doomed to failure. I even worked on a project that was a tiny part of Google Plus.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#304

Post by AsyncAwait » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

_uhtu wrote: post #6

Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. Currently on Facebook the news feed is…

> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook

I don't think Facebook will add them, but Diaspora has them.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#305

Post by omoikane » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

buserror wrote: post #166

I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts . That immediately stopped me posted anything. It's almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It's too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good 'circles' but I'm pretty su…

You can search for "from:me". For example, this link should show you your own posts from last year: https://plus.google.com/s/from%3Ame%20before%3A2018%2F01%2F1...

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#306

Post by chrisweekly » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

ma2rten wrote: post #297

_uhtu wrote: post #6

Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. Currently on Facebook the news feed is…

I disagree. I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air. However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate th…

"... out of thin air"

I'd say, rather, "out of Gmail account users"

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#307

Post by hockley » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

8ytecoder wrote: post #65

evgen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunitie…

This is a very cynical view of things. I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts. I can, however, perfectly imagine a PM who is "extremely numbers driven" to look a bad version of the algorithm that increases the time users spend shifting through shit and assume that the algorithm is a huge success b…

They are optimizing for posts that generate revenue. Since users don’t pay, the news feed is optimized for advertisers and the user posts that lead to more advertiser engagement.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#308

Post by reading-at-work » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

"90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds."

Oof. Good on them for finally admitting it, but who knew the data would be even harsher than G+'s most vocal critics.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#309

Post by artursapek » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

V-eHGsd_ wrote: post #69

rocqua wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rather different from Google Reader. Reader was a popular service that was going strong, the discontinuation really was a hassle to a lot of people. Google+ was essentially not used at all, so this should affect very few people.

Ironically, google reader was discontinued because they wanted people to use g+ exclusively for "sharing", and reader's ability to share/surface articles to friends was seen as unnecessary competition.

Reader died in vain

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#310

Post by sctb » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

p49k wrote: post #293

sctb wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure thing, if there's a news article that provides additional information from its own sources and supersedes the Google post, we can update the link.

Many articles fit such a description but were “duped”. Wouldn’t it benefit the site if at least one of those were allowed to exist alongside what is essentially Google’s response? The title of this article doesn’t even convey the most important point here, which is that hundreds of thousands of users had personal data leaked; instead, it conveys the idea that Google is doing something to “Protect data” which is somet…

Yes that's a good point, and it seems like the WSJ article has gone further into the story so we've un-duped it. There's a workaround for the paywall in the thread.