>Project Hancock was the internal code name of the project designed to do this. It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user. This is actually much more complicated than it sounds; it took a team of engineers somewhere around three months to accomplish it.
What this bit glosses over is the PR disaster that was Google forcing Google+ down the throats of its unwilling users. For example, for years they required Youtube users to consent to the creation of a Google+ profile in order to comment or message other users. I took that as a personal affront and not only refused to consent but installed an extension written specifically to block Google's constant, full-screen begging that blocked even passive Youtube usage.
When I pulled all my Google data with their personal download tool a few months ago, there was no section for Google+. I consider that a hard-won badge of honor.
You're not the only one, and I wonder how much that feeling contributed to the failure of Google+. Because the harder Google tried to shove it down my throat, the more I resented it and swore to myself that I wouldn't touch it.
Yep. It also happened around the same time when they ditched Reader. I never used Reader and don't care too much personally, but it seems they angered a small but vocal community that felt they were sacrificed for Google+.
This, Google was shoving the Hancock down to every Google user.
It didn't just die by itself. Google Talk was killed with Google+ too. It was a functional, no-nonsense IM that just worked and worked everywhere. After they engulfed this into Google+, it just became a bloated monstrosity that no one could understand. Remember when it suggested you every Google+ user when you tried to type a friend's name in Hangouts? Yeah... that was pretty fucked up.
I am just amazed that Youtube didn't die with it after it was used as a gateway to Google+.
This along with the forced YouTube integration were particularly egregious. Then there was the bit where they started forcing people to use real names. Overall they showed zero respect for their users and people deserted them accordingly.
I probably would have been interested at some point had I started using it by my own initiative, but I got forced into Google+ by this project.
I didn't understand what it was (a bare bones Facebook clone? ), didn't have friends who used it and I can't remember if I saw no content or just only irrelevant content. I gave it maybe 15 minutes and never came back.
And I actually considered myself an interested user, at the time I used Facebook but hated it and still saw Google as a force for good.
>It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user.
Oh god. Thanks to this dreadful decision I went from not giving a crap about G+ to actually despising it and wanting it to fail miserably.
I had a youtube account long before Google took over and now all my activity was being posted on my G+ account feed or something. Now I had to turn that off.
Thanks for letting everybody know that I liked some videos Barney the Dinosaur because I let my sister use my PC, Google.
Come on, it's Google. They would have killed it someday anyway. Had it lived longer, there would only be more angry users that wouldn't have got their data out.
I am sorry for the off topic comment but I can't even read this article because medium now shows me a "Sign up for an extra read" popup without any way of closing it. Medium is going so down the tubes, it's become impossible for me to read anything there. Does anyone have a way to bypass the sign up pop up?
if the author cares so little about their readers that they choose to distribute their content on medium, there's a good chance that content isn't worth reading.
An author may care so much about readership that they value reaching 50 million people, over a few dozens, if the price to pay is some inconvenience with the medium (see what I did there?)
That community of content creators chose the platform for the benefits of discovery, SEO and convenience. While I agree that there's great content on Medium, those upsides come with a few downsites for content consumers and losing a few of them comes with the territory. It's still a net positive for creators anyway, otherwise Medium wouldn't be a thing.
One easy way to communicate to said community that Medium provides a terrible experience for readers is by reducing page visits so that they start wondering about it and look for alternatives.
search for the extension "make medium readable again". I've come to see medium and google captcha as mental filters for judging the overall technical competence of the firm deploying them.
I use the Firefox extension "Hide fixed elements", which is not only useful for hiding these kinds of modals but also overlarge headers and cookie warnings.
That usually works but in this case, it’s not just a modal. It doesn’t show the article unless I sign up. No way to dismiss it either. It’s different than the modals I used to get last week.
Turns out "engineered social interactions" is indeed an oxymoron. Also, Google's work structure where most product leads don't have dedicated tech teams but instead have to win over tech groups to work on their projects result in too much technocracy and too little empathy in projects like this. Can't say I feels sorry for them though. Google masqueraded itself as an idealistic company and a champion of the internet but consistently kept undermining the free web in pursuit of money. It's a great business model and they made a huge commercial success. But the "do no evil" bullshit and the cult-like attitude of googlers is just pathetic.
Not being evil is achievable; most people achieve it. Doing no evil is impossible, even if you tie bells to your pants to avoid accidentally stepping on bugs.
Google is 'famously bottom up' as you mention. Problem I see here is that they tried to combine bottom-up, with the top-down edict of "We want to kill Facebook"
From Google Search onwards, I find/try the product, I like it, it evolves and improves (I presume after some A/B testing somewhere). e.g. gMail is 'web based email client', but was first I know of to let you tag, import from other accounts - and now has the tabs, unsubscribe buttons etc. When some changes (such as the tabs) first arrive, I feel a bit uncomfortable, but you get used to them.. then appreciate them.. and I build up a buffer of trust for the next change that might come.
G+ didn't spring into existence because of customer demand. It appeared because google decided google needed it. We didn't create accounts because they looked useful, they were created to try to get google's network running quickly. We had features pulled on other google products, to push us towards using the damn thing. e.g. I suspect removing latitude from maps wasn't a decision from the maps team to improve their product.
Computer networking in general and social apps in particular are still young, in civilization's history. We are still figuring this out. Maybe in a hundred years we will have a good grasp of what works. If the writer is right, then Google Plus's lack of traction was from the interaction among several subtle ingredients.
So similar to IRC. As much as I hate their desktop client, Discord is actually ticking all the right boxes for what I want out of social media. Ironically one of these things: broadcasting specific things to specific groups, is something G+ tried to do. If I see an interesting paper, I don't want to share that on FB and have my grandmother making confused comments. But I do have a discord channel w/ some college friends where something like that is appreciated.
At the same time, most of them aren't gamers, so gaming content is on a different channel. I don't even regularly use discord for their VOIP chat (arguably the reason they caught on), but unfortunately it is just easier to use for non-technical people than IRC.
I like this. I'm a Discord user with no real life friends on the service interacting with me, but I'd love to be able to suggest channels that don't exist on the WordPress server I use.
Instagram is very unidirectional. So is wechat (the instagram-like feature within China).
The whole "influencer" phenomenon (originating in the Chinese KOL - Key Opinion Leaders - phenomenon) is specifically engineered to be a unidirectional mechanism.
In fact, Snapchat tried to do the same with "Discover", which ended up in Google Plus territory. It was not very usable.
The problem was it relied on people self-categorizing their own content.
So just some person in the reddit web design circle thinks sharing their dogs or kids photos is fine and at that point G+ was worthless to me. IT's just subreddits without the moderation.
I don't think it's important whether Google+ failed or whether Facebook declines or not.
The fundamental failure is by computer science or the IETF that there is no open standard for federated social networking. Some might say social networking is out of scope for academic research. But why was SMTP not out of scope when it was invented?
> Some might say social networking is out of scope for academic research.
And you wouldn't even say that at this point, with the open-access movement and academics trying to think of alternative ways to do peer review and curation openly.
Nah dawg, Google+ failed because it didn't try to do any of the things that people who desired a different kind of social space might have wanted but couldn't get on Facebook at the time, perhaps things like anonymous accounts, private groups that didn't transitively leak information, or a space for collaboration on Google Docs. In other words, it made zero innovation over the incumbent, except for "circles", which was ill conceived.
What do you mean transitivelu leak information? It was possible to set up a community that only members could read. And once the nymwars where won you could get pysdonymious accounts.
The ranking system did kind of annoy me. We used G+ heavily inside of Google, and lots of interesting people posted interesting things. As time wore on, I felt like I got less and less of that stuff. A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link. I followed them. They followed me. The post had 300 +1s. But I could never see it.
The other thing I thought maybe killed G+ was the "ghost town" effect. Instead of forcing everyone to share everything publicly, people would just share with their close circles. So to an outside observer, it looked like a ghost town, but to the people using it, it seemed perfect.
In the end, I miss it. The people I interacted with on G+ were great. I met some people on the Internet that are now real-life friends. I could always post a random idea or a project I was working on and get feedback. Now I have nothing. Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are. Facebook seems dead (I never used it). Blogging sites like Medium seem evil. So I just share random things with random friends on Discord. It's sad. G+ could have done so well.
I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds blogged on it (eg. dead link https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY... about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there (assuming a big name won't let them down); certainly not a generic group chat/mail site.
We're being told on https://plus.google.com/ that [Google] are in the process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages. but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?
It's not static content. It would have been expensive to keep the services running. Not just in terms of computing and storage, but also for the headcount. Speaking of the latter, who would want to work on maintaining a read-only version of a project frozen in time? (The enterprise version will evolve, etc.) I am not even going into the legal implications.
As dredmorbius posted, the content is going to live on at the Internet Archive just fine (Google could maybe redirect to them, don't they?).
Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publishing content on G+ (or other platform for that matter). Why would they use an authoring tool that is exclusive to that platform when we have HTML? Why wouldn't they care about their docs being inaccessible if the platform dies?
What IA is doing is their business. I don't see Google linking or redirecting to them ever, for many reasons: security, (mostly) opening themselves to litigation from random users, etc.
Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of their ranking, as well as smaller details such as user names hyperlinked from the post body. All the data and metadata is stored across a large number of databases. I don't know of any products similar in scope that consist of pre-rendered HTML. Sure, you can scrape or render the HTML at a point in time, but that opens a new can of worms.
Fair points, but I guess I'm just puzzled how we've come to be fascinated by the business and technical side of Google+'s demise more than being worried about loosing almost all digital history of our times (not with Google+ specifically ;). Rendering HTML in web browsers seems like a problem solved 25 years ago, and so does authoring and server-side rendering (eg. SGML can pull metadata and compose fragments out of databases or whatever you want). But the 2010's have, I dunno, "educated" us to see script-heavy approaches and "platforms" as progress when in reality they're anything but, neither technically, nor from the PoV of author independence, nor for publisher syndication, nor for readers suffering through ads and tracking. Maybe dynamic content is the first we're going to loose, so with a 2010's media blackout, in 2035 we'll all be wondering what this decade was like.
> but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?
I might be misremembering, but wasn't the decision to completely kill Google+ made soon after a Google+ bug exposing account data was revealed (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-bug-expos...)? Given how integrated Google+ was with the rest of Google, keeping it alive, even in read-only mode, could be a security risk even for unrelated Google services.
Or just maintain the dang thing and leave it alone. I know that's not free, but what the heck even was their original plan for paying for it if it wasn't ad revenue?
I agree their content surfacing / organization was terrible. You couldn’t just find content from Person; hell, you couldn’t find your own. You literally had to google work-arounds on how to find the set of your -own- posts. Talk about alienating people from your product.
Medium is disagreeable, but there are many blogging sites still around, and people still follow them.
A good example is Syonyk's Project Blog (https://syonyk.blogspot.com/). It's hosted on Blogspot, and despite being relatively recent - started in 2015, long past the peak of blogging - he already has over 2.3 million views (total), just writing interesting detailed logs of his tech and home projects.
> Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are.
I restarted my Twitter, and just started following people who post things in interested in that are not politics -- for me, that's maker spaces, education, STEM, etc -- and it's night and day. A much smaller group of people who post interesting things, ask questions, interact, and are generally friendly.
And then this person you like and respect starts a political rant, and you just wish they'd keep talking about the thing you are actually interested in... til eventually you unfollow him or her.
I'm all over the map on twitter... I have a heavy interest in politics, though I do have to take breaks now and then. I also follow techies and a few other areas on interest.
> Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are.
There's a lot more to Twitter than that. Just don't follow anyone who posts that junk (even if they're real-life friends/acquaintances) and it's actually a pretty nice place to be. If you post interesting stuff and interact with others, you'll gain some followers and be able to have a real conversation, which you will then want to take elsewhere because of the fucking character limit.
> Instead of forcing everyone to share everything publicly, people would just share with their close circles.
This is an interesting point.
At the time G+ came out a lot of people were complaining about how you really didn't have control of your content on FB and G+ really tried to create an ecosystem where you had some control of your own content, which ironically what people wanted, but it never really took off.
I also remember some other social media platforms like Diaspora doing the same thing. Even now, I know of a few platforms that are taking a blockchain (decentralized) approach to social media. I think its still way too early to tell if people will use those in great numbers, but I think its the next natural step.
"A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link."
This is why I quickly quit using Facebook after only starting recently. Well, this and the way I cannot repeatably re-find a post after seeing it once.
This a thousand times. It's not just facebook though. Anything that has an algorithmically generated feed does it... "oh look there's two posts I'm interested in following. Which do i want to see more because the other won't be there ever again when I come back because the algorithm has to re-calculate based on the link i just followed." And yet the link I have no interest in following somehow stays lurking for days. /shrug
For what it's worth, regarding the asymmetric interactions, if my memory serves me right, it seemed to be Google+ that made Facebook introduce the notion of "Following" people. They were a good idea, just not a substitute for symmetric relationships.
Honest question, how much would it really cost to just keep it going? Vs killing the service, even if not investing in growing it? It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.
It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.
I think that sort of thinking is partly why it failed. Google+ was a great idea for Google but presented very little benefit to the user over what they'd get on any other social platform. Unless there's compelling reason why then users aren't going to invest time and effort in using a product, and they're going to be annoyed if they're forced to.
You can't fire and forget a service at Google, promo-driven churn in the tech stack will break it sooner or later. So you have to staff every service for indefinite maintenance, or kill it in an orderly way. This is also what happened to Reader.
So now our key internet services last about as long as the average team tenure. We really need open standards so we can rely on the internet as the infrastructure, not some cloud provider. Google will die one day like other services. One has to wonder about the fate of all the artifacts people entrust to it: they will be erased just like every time before.
The non-organic growth was more than 'just creating me an account' - there seemed to be a fair amount of "stick" to help me move.
My beloved Google Reader got killed and the latitude feature in my Google Maps was pulled with an explicit 'if you want this feature use Google+'
When I turned up at Google+ for the first time I was in a foul mood and was just there for my missing features - which were now missing/worse.
The idea of being able to create 'groups' was fine in theory - but bit of a mess in reality. Can't remember the exact details as it's gone - but my impression was being forced to use a poxy UI widget, for something better suited to a spreadsheet.
My learning though, was that maybe I didn't 'trust' the separation. On Facebook, LinkedIn, random forum - you don't consider each post and choose the audience.
Point above was exacerbated by the god-awful way information was displayed back to you. Seemed to vary between ghost-town bleakness and semi-random information-vomit, sprayed over your screen.
I have to disagree with the author. Google+ did not fail. Had it been a startup rather than a Google project, it would have been considered an amazing success. The problem was that the goal of being a Facebook killer was just too ambitious. Had it instead been a social feature amongst Google products it might have served valuable purpose for both Google and its users. Sadly, in a large corporation, every project has to meet some IRR hurdle, even if not explicitly. And at Google that hurdle was artificially high and Google+ could not meet it. This is why Alphabet makes so much sense, as it allows risk levels to be segregated.
But all its success came from strong-arming people into using it, using the leverage Google had with all its other products. So it makes zero sense to compare it to a startup.
That's not where all its success came from. That's the one downfall the article got right. It was successful before that. Trying to shoehorn a bunch of people who didn't want to use it into using it was the mistake. It was doing just fine before that and it would have continued to grow organically. It was never going to be a Facebook replacement though. It was better than that.
"90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds."
By most actual metrics, Google+ was a failure. 90% of people went there "accidentally". They were trying to do something useful, travel to somewhere useful on the Internet, and clicking the plus.google.com link was a mistake!
The key element of why Google+ failed is deeper than these arguments.
The key reason is because Google didn't do any 'human' testing before release.
They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it just for those people.
If it didn't work there (IE. See sustained growth till it had most of the market share), they should have changed the product, tested in a new town, etc.
As OP points out, without data, you can't make good decisions, and most decisions in a social product can't be retroactively changed. Even Facebook did staged school-by-school rollouts to refine their model before going fully public. Doing anything else is doomed to fail.
They tested it on Googlers, and we were extremely vocal about the things we didn't like, but were ignored by the higher ups (read: Vic), using the argument you mention - "oh, but you're not the typical users".
It failed because the point was to unify the privacy policy of all Google services (which means data collection would be less spreaded out across the different Google services). The Google+ front (the product users used) was more an excuse for people to sign up and agree to the terms. It had some interesting ideas but was never on the path of success after the initial goal was completed.
While I do (mostly) agree with this article, it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it. I couldn't post something on someone else's page. I could post something to my "feed" and they could happen to see it. But I couldn't post something into their "feed" (wall, timeline) where all their friends could see it and then comment on it.
It was more like Twitter than Facebook. Maybe I'm wrong, but too me they were marketing "Twitter with pictures" as "Facebook", and they fell short.
Indeed it was more like Twitter. Yet it was better than Twitter because it didn't have the severe post length limit and it would let you create channels (both private and open) for specific selection of people you invite to discuss a particular subject.
Actually, the story I hear from people under 35 or so is that Facebook is for old people like me (mid-50s), though I've never used it. My wife does, though. It seems awful.
My daughter and her friends all use Instagram and Snapchat, or probably something else now. They have dormant Facebook accounts they made when they were teens / early 20s that they've purged of all meaningful content.
> it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it
In fact, that was mentioned:
> Of course, Facebook’s news feed has many of the same design elements that I have described here, including ranking. However, important messages sent directly from one person to another have their own dedicated channel that works more like email, with strictly chronological ordering rather than ranking and with an explicit “mark as read” function. Ranking and algorithms are only used for nonessential postings.
Though I suppose it's ambiguous whether he means someone's Wall/Activity Log or Messenger, I suppose, but I read it as the former.
Almost all of my posts on G+ were autoposted from my blog. This was true for most of the people I followed as well. It was just another checkbox for promoting content hosted elsewhere. Interaction occurred in comments on my blog or on Facebook but almost never in G+.
374 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadWhat this bit glosses over is the PR disaster that was Google forcing Google+ down the throats of its unwilling users. For example, for years they required Youtube users to consent to the creation of a Google+ profile in order to comment or message other users. I took that as a personal affront and not only refused to consent but installed an extension written specifically to block Google's constant, full-screen begging that blocked even passive Youtube usage.
When I pulled all my Google data with their personal download tool a few months ago, there was no section for Google+. I consider that a hard-won badge of honor.
You're not the only one, and I wonder how much that feeling contributed to the failure of Google+. Because the harder Google tried to shove it down my throat, the more I resented it and swore to myself that I wouldn't touch it.
It didn't just die by itself. Google Talk was killed with Google+ too. It was a functional, no-nonsense IM that just worked and worked everywhere. After they engulfed this into Google+, it just became a bloated monstrosity that no one could understand. Remember when it suggested you every Google+ user when you tried to type a friend's name in Hangouts? Yeah... that was pretty fucked up.
I am just amazed that Youtube didn't die with it after it was used as a gateway to Google+.
My brain read that as "down every Google user's throat", and I got an idea why they decided to name it that.
It's the only Google product that felt fun to use. I haven't bothered with Hangouts, Allo, Duo or any of the stuff that followed it.
I didn't understand what it was (a bare bones Facebook clone? ), didn't have friends who used it and I can't remember if I saw no content or just only irrelevant content. I gave it maybe 15 minutes and never came back.
And I actually considered myself an interested user, at the time I used Facebook but hated it and still saw Google as a force for good.
Oh god. Thanks to this dreadful decision I went from not giving a crap about G+ to actually despising it and wanting it to fail miserably.
I had a youtube account long before Google took over and now all my activity was being posted on my G+ account feed or something. Now I had to turn that off.
Thanks for letting everybody know that I liked some videos Barney the Dinosaur because I let my sister use my PC, Google.
So, too, the difference between "don't be evil" and "be good."
From Google Search onwards, I find/try the product, I like it, it evolves and improves (I presume after some A/B testing somewhere). e.g. gMail is 'web based email client', but was first I know of to let you tag, import from other accounts - and now has the tabs, unsubscribe buttons etc. When some changes (such as the tabs) first arrive, I feel a bit uncomfortable, but you get used to them.. then appreciate them.. and I build up a buffer of trust for the next change that might come.
G+ didn't spring into existence because of customer demand. It appeared because google decided google needed it. We didn't create accounts because they looked useful, they were created to try to get google's network running quickly. We had features pulled on other google products, to push us towards using the damn thing. e.g. I suspect removing latitude from maps wasn't a decision from the maps team to improve their product.
It seems like a better model should somehow encourage people to think about their audience and post what they would appreciate.
At the same time, most of them aren't gamers, so gaming content is on a different channel. I don't even regularly use discord for their VOIP chat (arguably the reason they caught on), but unfortunately it is just easier to use for non-technical people than IRC.
The whole "influencer" phenomenon (originating in the Chinese KOL - Key Opinion Leaders - phenomenon) is specifically engineered to be a unidirectional mechanism.
In fact, Snapchat tried to do the same with "Discover", which ended up in Google Plus territory. It was not very usable.
I wrote about this a while ago and submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515513
The problem was it relied on people self-categorizing their own content.
So just some person in the reddit web design circle thinks sharing their dogs or kids photos is fine and at that point G+ was worthless to me. IT's just subreddits without the moderation.
Leading to the inevitable "you're holding it wrong" accusations agaist the poster that they weren't posting correctly.
Collections, a late feature addition, helped this markedly.
The fundamental failure is by computer science or the IETF that there is no open standard for federated social networking. Some might say social networking is out of scope for academic research. But why was SMTP not out of scope when it was invented?
There is ActivityPub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub) but it's unlikely that any of the big parties is going to adopt it.
And you wouldn't even say that at this point, with the open-access movement and academics trying to think of alternative ways to do peer review and curation openly.
The other thing I thought maybe killed G+ was the "ghost town" effect. Instead of forcing everyone to share everything publicly, people would just share with their close circles. So to an outside observer, it looked like a ghost town, but to the people using it, it seemed perfect.
In the end, I miss it. The people I interacted with on G+ were great. I met some people on the Internet that are now real-life friends. I could always post a random idea or a project I was working on and get feedback. Now I have nothing. Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are. Facebook seems dead (I never used it). Blogging sites like Medium seem evil. So I just share random things with random friends on Discord. It's sad. G+ could have done so well.
We're being told on https://plus.google.com/ that [Google] are in the process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages. but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google%2B
You'll need to know, or track down, the user or content page to find it. E.g.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190102053619/https://plus.goog...
Raw archive dumps:
https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googleplus
Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publishing content on G+ (or other platform for that matter). Why would they use an authoring tool that is exclusive to that platform when we have HTML? Why wouldn't they care about their docs being inaccessible if the platform dies?
Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of their ranking, as well as smaller details such as user names hyperlinked from the post body. All the data and metadata is stored across a large number of databases. I don't know of any products similar in scope that consist of pre-rendered HTML. Sure, you can scrape or render the HTML at a point in time, but that opens a new can of worms.
For money? Lots of people.
Does Google have a fascination with only hiring people that want to write dissertations about their project of the month?
I might be misremembering, but wasn't the decision to completely kill Google+ made soon after a Google+ bug exposing account data was revealed (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-bug-expos...)? Given how integrated Google+ was with the rest of Google, keeping it alive, even in read-only mode, could be a security risk even for unrelated Google services.
A good example is Syonyk's Project Blog (https://syonyk.blogspot.com/). It's hosted on Blogspot, and despite being relatively recent - started in 2015, long past the peak of blogging - he already has over 2.3 million views (total), just writing interesting detailed logs of his tech and home projects.
I restarted my Twitter, and just started following people who post things in interested in that are not politics -- for me, that's maker spaces, education, STEM, etc -- and it's night and day. A much smaller group of people who post interesting things, ask questions, interact, and are generally friendly.
There's a lot more to Twitter than that. Just don't follow anyone who posts that junk (even if they're real-life friends/acquaintances) and it's actually a pretty nice place to be. If you post interesting stuff and interact with others, you'll gain some followers and be able to have a real conversation, which you will then want to take elsewhere because of the fucking character limit.
This is an interesting point.
At the time G+ came out a lot of people were complaining about how you really didn't have control of your content on FB and G+ really tried to create an ecosystem where you had some control of your own content, which ironically what people wanted, but it never really took off.
I also remember some other social media platforms like Diaspora doing the same thing. Even now, I know of a few platforms that are taking a blockchain (decentralized) approach to social media. I think its still way too early to tell if people will use those in great numbers, but I think its the next natural step.
Maybe G+ was ahead of its time??
This is why I quickly quit using Facebook after only starting recently. Well, this and the way I cannot repeatably re-find a post after seeing it once.
I think that sort of thinking is partly why it failed. Google+ was a great idea for Google but presented very little benefit to the user over what they'd get on any other social platform. Unless there's compelling reason why then users aren't going to invest time and effort in using a product, and they're going to be annoyed if they're forced to.
My beloved Google Reader got killed and the latitude feature in my Google Maps was pulled with an explicit 'if you want this feature use Google+'
When I turned up at Google+ for the first time I was in a foul mood and was just there for my missing features - which were now missing/worse.
The idea of being able to create 'groups' was fine in theory - but bit of a mess in reality. Can't remember the exact details as it's gone - but my impression was being forced to use a poxy UI widget, for something better suited to a spreadsheet. My learning though, was that maybe I didn't 'trust' the separation. On Facebook, LinkedIn, random forum - you don't consider each post and choose the audience.
Point above was exacerbated by the god-awful way information was displayed back to you. Seemed to vary between ghost-town bleakness and semi-random information-vomit, sprayed over your screen.
By most actual metrics, Google+ was a failure. 90% of people went there "accidentally". They were trying to do something useful, travel to somewhere useful on the Internet, and clicking the plus.google.com link was a mistake!
90%!
The key reason is because Google didn't do any 'human' testing before release.
They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it just for those people.
If it didn't work there (IE. See sustained growth till it had most of the market share), they should have changed the product, tested in a new town, etc.
As OP points out, without data, you can't make good decisions, and most decisions in a social product can't be retroactively changed. Even Facebook did staged school-by-school rollouts to refine their model before going fully public. Doing anything else is doomed to fail.
It was more like Twitter than Facebook. Maybe I'm wrong, but too me they were marketing "Twitter with pictures" as "Facebook", and they fell short.
Other times there's like maybe an inside joke or a picture or an anecdote that you think that their friends would enjoy more than your friends.
It's used way more by younger people, though.
My daughter and her friends all use Instagram and Snapchat, or probably something else now. They have dormant Facebook accounts they made when they were teens / early 20s that they've purged of all meaningful content.
In fact, that was mentioned:
> Of course, Facebook’s news feed has many of the same design elements that I have described here, including ranking. However, important messages sent directly from one person to another have their own dedicated channel that works more like email, with strictly chronological ordering rather than ranking and with an explicit “mark as read” function. Ranking and algorithms are only used for nonessential postings.
Though I suppose it's ambiguous whether he means someone's Wall/Activity Log or Messenger, I suppose, but I read it as the former.