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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#551

Post by lotsofpulp »

rapind wrote: post #477
Yhippa wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like grocery stores putting milk and bread way in the back so you have to walk by all those high margin items.

There's a practical reason for this. Temperature and where they unload (and the perishable nature). Not saying there couldn't be a manipulative reason too, but I wouldn't assume so by default.

Everything in business happens to increase sales. For retail, there’s even a name and occupation for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planogram

You always want dairy and fruits/vegetables on opposite sides of the store since they’re perishable, hence they get purchased the most often, and you want people to walk past all the other aisles every time.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#552

Post by vidarh »

martinbooth wrote: post #536
Yhippa wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like grocery stores putting milk and bread way in the back so you have to walk by all those high margin items.

Yes.. and just like trying to get out of Ikea

Ikea is funny because it has "shortcuts" all over the place where you can bypass larger chunks of the full path. You just need to look for doorways outside the main path. Also because most (all?) it's stores follow a very similar layout, so once you've been to one, you'll find the shortcuts in the others very easily and know pretty much exactly where you'll end up. They've just made the obvious path simple enough to mindlessly follow that most people do.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#553

Post by grizzles »

No other platform had as much clickspam / clickfraud stuff as G+. Every time I looked at my feed there were 10+ pictures of fake hot girl videos that clicked off to random sites. That G+ itself was such a player in click fraud, I'm surprised there wasn't more hay made about this before.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#554

Post by scoggs »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #453
anonacct37 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly believe stuff like this doesn't happen by accident. It's easy to write pieces about how a soulless algorithm is determining stuff and we can all be sad about it, but in my experience, that's rarely true. There's almost always at least a software developer (or technical person of some sort) calling out "Hey, are you sure we should rank by $X? It will have this edge case in situations $Y and $X?". Usually th…

Even if we grant them the benefit of doubt, it certainly isn't an accident to keep using the same algorithm once you know its consequences. There's been hand-wringing about Youtube funnelling users to extremist content, and it always comes to down to "the algorithm" as if there's nothing that can be done about it. Someone had to choose to implement the algorithm. Someone had to choose the metrics it was optimized to…

I view facebook's newsfeed and youtube's list of suggestions like entering into a popular reddit thread about something dividing the community that has lots of posts.

You enter into the comment section and it's automatically sorted by Controversial. At least that's how I see it.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#555

Post by stevenwoo »

mcv wrote: post #476
stevenwoo wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet in real life to RPG or online somehow? How about a private subreddit?

Real life is a very different use case. Better, but also a lot harder. I've never actually tried reddit, but my impression is that it's more of a traditional forum, but lots of them. At the moment, G+ers seem to be gravitating towards MeWe.

One can have a private, invite only subreddit and one can choose all the moderators of the subreddit. I think that if you use reddit's native mobile or web page css they push ads on you so I don't use either of those.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#556

Post by MisterOctober »

I didn't see this sentiment expressed elsewhere in this comment section, so I'll express it : G+ was overrun by vapid, spam-crazy self-promoters and for me, it quickly got too annoying to use [say, in 2012 or so]. Every time I logged in, I had to winnow them out of the list of connection requests, which was a time-eater especially if I'd been to a large gathering or something lately. "Lessee... Dave Stevens... did I meet him at that thing last week or something?... no, just another 'rock star' to delete..."

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#557

Post by nikofeyn »

class4behavior wrote: post #466
mindgam3 wrote: post #373

RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle. Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they…

>RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle. Absolutely this. It is, however, not the marketing strategy that failed them. G+ was hyped for some time before release and it became a hit since day one. With the level of attention any Google product gai…

i haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but google+ made it difficult to join in the beginning. it was invite only or something else limiting like that where you couldn't join even if you wanted to unless you had an invite. i remember it being quite a long time after their initial buzz before they opened it up. it made me lose interest.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#559

Post by minikomi »

cpeterso wrote: post #226
ChuckMcM wrote: post #102

packets to packets, bits to bits. I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well. I…

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.

This is essentially what LINE did - gradually added small social features and then expanded into separate apps with LINE social network integration.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#560

Post by qunow »

vidarh wrote: post #549
_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…

This was the biggest appeal of Google+ for me: That they recognised two things about relationships that Facebook pretends doesn't exist. Namely that relationships are inherently asymmetrical, and that we are different people to different people. We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. N…

That also allowed Google+ to be used for virtual relationship with virtual identify far better than Facebook, although that is something Google dislike and constantly trying to crack down.
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