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Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “frie

Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page. Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.

iseanstevens 10mo ago
Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.
- BrenBarn 10mo ago
  In retrospect LiveJournal was pretty great as a social network of its time. It's too bad it got turned into some kind of Russian spam site.
  - NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
    it was russian twitter and twitter is a spam site, so you're somewhat right
alex1138 10mo ago
+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)
- mikepurvis 10mo ago
  It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to leverage some of the existing social networking going on on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and making the actual posts/comments into first class global content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your content to its intended audience. (See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)
  - alex1138 10mo ago
    Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels like one of these things where mediocre people get control over something which was initially made by people who actually know what they're doing
    - esseph 10mo ago
      > Reddit is fucking miserable Reddit is the town bar, the popular one. Some people love the town bar! :) Some people hate the town bar! :(
      - somenameforme 10mo ago
        Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level. When you start to get the number of users sites like Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have that on Reddit. I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
CobrastanJorji 10mo ago
I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing! Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
- falcor84 10mo ago
  The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.
  - SR2Z 10mo ago
    I think that change happened well after G+ was dead
    - falcor84 10mo ago
      I just found this October 2011 post reporting about this change as it happened (4 months after G+'s launch in June 2011): https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/ https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/ According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the reporting methodology seems very inconsistent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

iseanstevens 10mo ago

Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.

BrenBarn 10mo ago
In retrospect LiveJournal was pretty great as a social network of its time. It's too bad it got turned into some kind of Russian spam site.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
  it was russian twitter and twitter is a spam site, so you're somewhat right

alex1138 10mo ago

+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)

mikepurvis 10mo ago
It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to leverage some of the existing social networking going on on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and making the actual posts/comments into first class global content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your content to its intended audience. (See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)
- alex1138 10mo ago
  Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels like one of these things where mediocre people get control over something which was initially made by people who actually know what they're doing
  - esseph 10mo ago
    > Reddit is fucking miserable Reddit is the town bar, the popular one. Some people love the town bar! :) Some people hate the town bar! :(
    - somenameforme 10mo ago
      Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level. When you start to get the number of users sites like Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have that on Reddit. I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'

CobrastanJorji 10mo ago

I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing! Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.

falcor84 10mo ago
The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.
- SR2Z 10mo ago
  I think that change happened well after G+ was dead
  - falcor84 10mo ago
    I just found this October 2011 post reporting about this change as it happened (4 months after G+'s launch in June 2011): https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/ https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/ According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the reporting methodology seems very inconsistent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B