4 ms·

I am always amazed people liked g+ circles so much. I often found them rather clumsy and isolating. Maybe I just don't get what people want out of these platfor

I am always amazed people liked g+ circles so much. I often found them rather clumsy and isolating. Maybe I just don't get what people want out of these platforms? I was always more of a forum type and also more reader than participant. Looking at circles specifically, I often saw patterns of "Everyone tell me what you want to read about so I can put you in the right circle" which meant you had to manually subscribe and unsubscribe by private message and could often see nothing at all if you didn't want to contact that person. This is of course nice for privacy and getting to personally know people, but I found it really hindering to discussion and a having a usable archive of a community. Of course, google+, like most modern social media, was also people-centric instead of topic centric, which always annoyed me, but many people seem to like? It still was a network where I read many cool things and had interesting discussion, but I felt like it was a watered down replacement of forums even back then.

ghaff 5y ago
One obvious use case of circles was having a personal and a professional circle. While I just have a single handle on Twitter, my personal content is also highly innocuous. There are definitely situations where you don't want to swizzle everything together.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  For that, though, you ultimately want groups. The problem with G+ Circles (or Diaspora* Aspects, which were an earlier version of the same thing) is that the people and profiles in your circles have no idea how you've classified them. One persistent argument in the early years of G+ was some Circler yelling at other a Circlee whom the Circler had classified invisibly to the Circlee that "they (the Circlee) were holding it wrong" --- not posting to G+ in the way in which the Circler had anticipated. It turns out that what you actually really want are groups, not Circles. (Preferably some kind of light-weight group with an easy join/quit dynamic and little overhead, but also robust moderation tools for larger cases, another aspect G+ never delivered on.) I ranted about G+ failings for a long time, but ultimately reached a rather frustrated equanimity about it. At one point I commented to the effect that "It's a simple tool, designed for simple problems." That is, it lacked many features I and others would have liked to see. One of the people +1'ing that particular post was Google+'s chief architect. The best use I've found for Circles is to group profiles very roughly by interest level, usually into 2--4 tiers, from greatest to least interest. This permits following a fairly large group (though I prefer keeping even that limited) but without being overwhelmed by content. I've used that model on G+, Diaspora*, and Mastodon, pretty effectively.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I was more commenting on the general concept than a specific implementation. To be honest, while I tried to be optimistic about Google+ I never used it much and didn't dive into things like Circles hardly at all. Certainly there can be a need to partition things. Today, I pretty much do it by using different social media for different purposes and, to the degree I blend some things, I keep it mostly uncontroversial and not overwhelming for those who may be only interested in some aspect.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Circles turned out to be immensely painful to manage, for numerous reasons. The easiest approach was often to simply nuke them all and start over. Surprisingly, this was remarkably non-lossy. One of the more interesting episodes I had on G+ was when my primary profile was blocked (authentication issues) and I created a new one. In a fit of pique I named that "The Real Slim Shady", and started connecting up with a few key contacts. Within a few days I'd certainly managed to restore my core list of about 100 or so connections. Several people commented on how clear it was to them that this was in fact the same individual. (I did confirm the association through several other sites, which helps.) It also revealed the value of quashing even only a small number of sources of major noise. (See my recent HN submission of Yonatan Zunger's "Privacy, Triage, and Risk" talk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249630 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9HQBCEW9odU https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9HQBCEW9odU https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr19/presentation/zunger https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr19/presentation/zunger for the relationship between harm-reduction / risk mitigation vs. value-creation. The former is vastly more effective.) This episode gave me a few insights on the nature of identity and trust. It also reminds me of how rapidly even massively-damaged cities and countries (war, natural disaster, etc.) tend to recover, especially if essential culture remains intact. Perhaps not entirely per their previous trajectory, but often with remarkably little long-term impact. This contrasts with trying to raise a specific region up out of poverty, a lack of institutions and infrastructure, and often a low-trust / high-corruption culture.
eitland 5y ago
It wasn't so much circles as everything else. Actually circles in themselves felt botched and I stopped using them. The good things about Google + was: - high signal to noise ratio - you could follow what people wrote about programming or photography without following what they wrote in their local language about local politics (i.e. think if you could follow just @eitland#programming on twitter instead of getting everything I wrote) - beautiful reading experience
- WesleyJohnson 5y ago
  I don't remember how this worked. Was the author in charge of tagging things they wrote, were posts categorized in some sort of folder structure?
  - jaredsohn 5y ago
    The author indicates who they want to share each post with. Facebook came up with Friend Lists a little later which are similar. https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to-create-and-use-the-friend-list-feature/ https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to...
    - Izkata 5y ago
      > Meanwhile, I grumbled (to myself and on Twitter and probably to anyone who was willing to listen to my grumbling) about the fact that Facebook had, in fact, rolled out this feature at least two years prior, and probably much earlier than that. Facebook had it first, not google+ circles. I was using it something like 2008-2010 during college, to keep some posts friends-only and hidden from family.
      - jaredsohn 5y ago
        Thanks; vaguely remember that. I think Facebook added some UX to emphasize it more in response to Google Plus
SimianLogic 5y ago
I built a shitty prototype of something similar in 2005 or 2006 for a grad school assignment. I was already seeing problems with facebook: I had my high school friends, undergrad friends, grad school friends, trivia buddies. I actually had two accounts for awhile because you couldn't switch schools yet, but it was a pain to manage. Facebook was a lot more of a public messaging platform in the early days instead of a sharing/blogging/publishing platform. I don't even know if you could use it that way any more, but group chat has pretty much filled that need. I use hangouts (chat? gmail chat? i don't know what it's called any more) or line/wechat more than any social network these days and have different chats set up for different groups of people. I think G+ was trying to solve the right problem, but the proliferation of different niche types of networks has solved it in a better way (follow me on Twitter for shit takes, FB for racist news articles, IG for photos, group chat for planning, etc).

ghaff 5y ago

One obvious use case of circles was having a personal and a professional circle. While I just have a single handle on Twitter, my personal content is also highly innocuous. There are definitely situations where you don't want to swizzle everything together.

dredmorbius 5y ago
For that, though, you ultimately want groups. The problem with G+ Circles (or Diaspora* Aspects, which were an earlier version of the same thing) is that the people and profiles in your circles have no idea how you've classified them. One persistent argument in the early years of G+ was some Circler yelling at other a Circlee whom the Circler had classified invisibly to the Circlee that "they (the Circlee) were holding it wrong" --- not posting to G+ in the way in which the Circler had anticipated. It turns out that what you actually really want are groups, not Circles. (Preferably some kind of light-weight group with an easy join/quit dynamic and little overhead, but also robust moderation tools for larger cases, another aspect G+ never delivered on.) I ranted about G+ failings for a long time, but ultimately reached a rather frustrated equanimity about it. At one point I commented to the effect that "It's a simple tool, designed for simple problems." That is, it lacked many features I and others would have liked to see. One of the people +1'ing that particular post was Google+'s chief architect. The best use I've found for Circles is to group profiles very roughly by interest level, usually into 2--4 tiers, from greatest to least interest. This permits following a fairly large group (though I prefer keeping even that limited) but without being overwhelmed by content. I've used that model on G+, Diaspora*, and Mastodon, pretty effectively.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I was more commenting on the general concept than a specific implementation. To be honest, while I tried to be optimistic about Google+ I never used it much and didn't dive into things like Circles hardly at all. Certainly there can be a need to partition things. Today, I pretty much do it by using different social media for different purposes and, to the degree I blend some things, I keep it mostly uncontroversial and not overwhelming for those who may be only interested in some aspect.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Circles turned out to be immensely painful to manage, for numerous reasons. The easiest approach was often to simply nuke them all and start over. Surprisingly, this was remarkably non-lossy. One of the more interesting episodes I had on G+ was when my primary profile was blocked (authentication issues) and I created a new one. In a fit of pique I named that "The Real Slim Shady", and started connecting up with a few key contacts. Within a few days I'd certainly managed to restore my core list of about 100 or so connections. Several people commented on how clear it was to them that this was in fact the same individual. (I did confirm the association through several other sites, which helps.) It also revealed the value of quashing even only a small number of sources of major noise. (See my recent HN submission of Yonatan Zunger's "Privacy, Triage, and Risk" talk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249630 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9HQBCEW9odU https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9HQBCEW9odU https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr19/presentation/zunger https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr19/presentation/zunger for the relationship between harm-reduction / risk mitigation vs. value-creation. The former is vastly more effective.) This episode gave me a few insights on the nature of identity and trust. It also reminds me of how rapidly even massively-damaged cities and countries (war, natural disaster, etc.) tend to recover, especially if essential culture remains intact. Perhaps not entirely per their previous trajectory, but often with remarkably little long-term impact. This contrasts with trying to raise a specific region up out of poverty, a lack of institutions and infrastructure, and often a low-trust / high-corruption culture.

eitland 5y ago

It wasn't so much circles as everything else. Actually circles in themselves felt botched and I stopped using them. The good things about Google + was: - high signal to noise ratio - you could follow what people wrote about programming or photography without following what they wrote in their local language about local politics (i.e. think if you could follow just @eitland#programming on twitter instead of getting everything I wrote) - beautiful reading experience

WesleyJohnson 5y ago
I don't remember how this worked. Was the author in charge of tagging things they wrote, were posts categorized in some sort of folder structure?
- jaredsohn 5y ago
  The author indicates who they want to share each post with. Facebook came up with Friend Lists a little later which are similar. https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to-create-and-use-the-friend-list-feature/ https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to...
  - Izkata 5y ago
    > Meanwhile, I grumbled (to myself and on Twitter and probably to anyone who was willing to listen to my grumbling) about the fact that Facebook had, in fact, rolled out this feature at least two years prior, and probably much earlier than that. Facebook had it first, not google+ circles. I was using it something like 2008-2010 during college, to keep some posts friends-only and hidden from family.
    - jaredsohn 5y ago
      Thanks; vaguely remember that. I think Facebook added some UX to emphasize it more in response to Google Plus

SimianLogic 5y ago

I built a shitty prototype of something similar in 2005 or 2006 for a grad school assignment. I was already seeing problems with facebook: I had my high school friends, undergrad friends, grad school friends, trivia buddies. I actually had two accounts for awhile because you couldn't switch schools yet, but it was a pain to manage. Facebook was a lot more of a public messaging platform in the early days instead of a sharing/blogging/publishing platform. I don't even know if you could use it that way any more, but group chat has pretty much filled that need. I use hangouts (chat? gmail chat? i don't know what it's called any more) or line/wechat more than any social network these days and have different chats set up for different groups of people. I think G+ was trying to solve the right problem, but the proliferation of different niche types of networks has solved it in a better way (follow me on Twitter for shit takes, FB for racist news articles, IG for photos, group chat for planning, etc).