Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 733 posts

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#651

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tinkerteller wrote: post #645

Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight fo…

After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social.

What? They spent a decade on G+, launched it with much fanfare, annnd it just didn't pan out. Sure, they didn't drive it down Google users' throats as aggressively as they could have (via e.g. Search, Chrome or Gmail) but that really wouldn't have helped them - Facebook didn't grow like that either. Social networks need to grow via organic growth, via word of mouth.

Anyway they're cutting their losses finally instead of indulging in the sunk cost fallacy, I say good riddance. You also mention Maps, Gmail, YouTube and Android but these are all highly popular - and profitable - services and have been since the start.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#652

Post by pdpi »

mliker wrote: post #626
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…

"There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this." Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.

That's a great example of building a feature as one of the cornerstones of your product vs adding a feature to tick a checkbox.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#653

Post by cyborgx7 »

airstrike wrote: post #561
derefr wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only works for about seven years at a time, though. Eventually, the app where your college-aged college friends are (Facebook) becomes the app where the adult-aged friends you know from college are (Facebook), becomes the app that the next generation thinks of as "the app their parents use", and therefore don't want to post anything public to lest some adult who knows their parents sees it. So far, I'm pretty ha…

> So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord. You mean IRC?

Not the same posters, but yes, that is what it is esentially. People are starting to notice that they don't actually want "social networks". Most people are not interested in constantly curating an optimal public image of themselves. What people want is communicating with people they like and share interests with. Slack and Discord are basically efforts to make more user friendly IRC. There is nothing wrong with that. (Except of issues with centralization and non-standards based communication)

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#654

Post by natecavanaugh »

lowlevel wrote: post #638
gcatalfamo wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it is so hidden and “ancient” that I would be surprised if more than 1% of users actively uses it.

I’ve given up trying to find anything on facebook... I just post a picture once in a while and talk to whoever comments on it.

Search discovery is by far my biggest pain point, and I say it as a fan.

I disagree with the GGP (I think) about Facebook wanting you to wade throw a river of crap so you stumble on ads. Their ads have been spot on to my interests so far.

I think an onioned version of Google plus circles could help Facebok influence the AI without preventing discovery.

But TBH, had G+ really been a contender at this point? This sounds like the creak of an abandoned house by now.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#655

Post by Double_a_92 »

microtherion wrote: post #341
pessimizer wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post I'm not sure why this is harder than choosing an email address to send an email to. Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP. Seems like the easiest thing in the world. Also seems weird to say that even selecting a group to share to i…

> Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP. But if you're truly disciplined about this, you never learn that your second cousin is interested in quilting too. And in many scenarios, there is little reward to being disciplined; unless you're into rather transgressive quilting, you'll probably share your quilting projects with everyone.

There is nothing stopping you from sharing things you are proud of with you family circle. But technical discussions about quilting don't need to eventually end up on a random friends feed.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#656

Post by anticensor »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #185
urda wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly does "sunsetting consumer Google+" mean? The blog post wasn't particularly enlightening. Are they shutting down Google+ as a social network? FTA: Action 1: We are shutting down Google+ for consumers. seems pretty obvious that's the case.

I mean, I get the term "sunsetting" - that isn't the problem. I don't know what "consumer Google+" means. I can guess that it might refer to the use of Google+ by ordinary people as a social network, but I'm far from certain of that interpretation.

It is one you access via https://plus.google.com .

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#660

Post by Cthulhu_ »

JepZ wrote: post #456
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…

I still miss Wave... In my opinion, Googles biggest failure was the missing real-world federation. They promised us, that there will be a server to run on your own hardware and yet it took them years to release anything that was usable. Even years after the open source release the software was quite unstable. Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wav…

Personally, visual clutter and poor performance were two major factors why Wave didn't work for me. Visually they were cramming too much stuff on the page, with loads of avatars / icons for participants and the like - IMO unnecessary information to have on the landing page. And performance wise it was just not good enough, maybe if they made it an optimized native app instead of a webapp.

At least they could incorporate the tech they developed and used for Wave in other products, notably Docs and G+.

Post reply on HN