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What killed Google+ is the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good. They had a brief window where everyone wanted to use it, and they kept it loc

by viccis 6mo ago

What killed Google+ is the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good. They had a brief window where everyone wanted to use it, and they kept it locked behind a hard to get invite system for months and months.

onemoresoop 6mo ago
Thats not the only thing that killed google+ though. I think their aggressive push was their demise, forced all their users to use google+, mangled with youtube and gmail accounts and all that pissed off a lot of users.
echelon 6mo ago
> the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good. That's not it at all. Bluesky is simply just too political. X is too political. Bluesky is too political. When you focus on content and sharing and having a good time, then the network takes off. I'm not saying politics isn't important. I'm saying it can't become the miasma that pervades the entire service and makes the entire point of the social network complaining about politics, polarized attacks, etc.
- angoragoats 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Forgeties79 6mo ago
    “Too political” usually means “not my politics” IME.
    - angoragoats 6mo ago
      Maybe? But that doesn't really have much to do with my point.
      - Forgeties79 6mo ago
        I was agreeing with you
  - viccis 6mo ago
    >Twitter is a haven for people who are fans of generating non-consensual porn of others, white supremacy/white nationalism, murder of innocent civilians, and other reprehensible things. It's really not. It's where everyone is right now. The Trots and Maoists. The demsoc local politicians. The vegan militant organizers. Etc. You can also include whatever shitty group you want to cherry pick to make your disingenuous ass argument. And when you do, post it to Bluesky where people can get a dopamine rush with you as they shake their heads and smile and post how horrible it is.
    - angoragoats 6mo ago
      Based on this reply and others, it seems Twitter is frying your brain and you should probably stop using it. Care to actually refute my point instead of saying “nuh uh” and lobbing some childish insults my way?
      - viccis 6mo ago
        I never claimed to actively use Twitter anywhere in here.
        angoragoats 6mo ago
        That still doesn't actually address my argument. And I assumed you did, since you said "It's where everyone is right now" (which is objectively false). So, as an aside, do you actively use Twitter? Or are you going to dodge that too?
- viccis 6mo ago
  Bluesky is political because their invite-only on-boarding process for months meant that only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in. By the time your average person who just wanted to stop seeing ads about Great Replacement Theory or whatever found their way into Bluesky, it was chock full of furry art, "fandom" posting from teenagers on the spectrum, and political rambling from people who haven't touched grass since puberty.
  - angoragoats 6mo ago
    How does having a really tightly controlled and/or lengthy invite period translate into the user base being of one particular political viewpoint? I'm not seeing the causal link. Even if I take at face value your claim that "only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in," I still don't see how these subgroups or subcultures would necessarily have the same political views.
    - viccis 6mo ago
      Well it self selected for left wing ones. My point is normal people who aren't extremely online and part of 10 Discord servers with an internet friend network who can hook them up with an invite didn't get into Bluesky. Instead the people who, well, did, got the invites. Obviously the extremely online right didn't because they had other places to go and weren't welcomed by the bsky admins.
      - cestith 6mo ago
        Twitter going so far right helped select Bluesky and Mastodon moving further left.
      - angoragoats 6mo ago
        “Well it self selected for left wing ones” didn’t answer my question in the least, so I’ll just assume your claim is false.
        6mo ago
acdha 6mo ago
It was worse than that: they forced _everyone_ into it, whether or not you had any interest in using it. They did this before having notification control or usable filtering[1] so what this meant was for most of year, you'd login to Gmail and see the upper right notification badge be !!!LOOK AT ME!!! red only to click on it and see it was telling you that some dude who no-showed on a Craigslist sale 10 years ago in a different city had been forced to “join” Google+. Even worse, it took like 6 months for their iOS developers to give you any control over push notifications so you got all of that as push notifications until you deleted the app. They also annoyed key communities like Google Reader users: that wasn't their largest popular social network but it was one which people actually liked and it disproportionately skewed towards people like journalists, bloggers, etc. who recommended technology to other people. The conversion to Google+ was really clumsy and they did things like replacing the popular Reader commenting system with a Google+ “integration” which didn't work at all on mobile devices[2], which meant that a ton of influential people had a really negative experience and told everyone they knew about it. 1. The “circles” idea reportedly worked well when it was Google employees using it internally but it relied on the poster picking an audience for a post, which failed in the real world when the spammiest people think everyone is interested in their every word. 2. The dialog was sized for a desktop display so the post button was inaccessible off the screen.

by viccis 6mo ago

onemoresoop 6mo ago

Thats not the only thing that killed google+ though. I think their aggressive push was their demise, forced all their users to use google+, mangled with youtube and gmail accounts and all that pissed off a lot of users.

echelon 6mo ago

> the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good. That's not it at all. Bluesky is simply just too political. X is too political. Bluesky is too political. When you focus on content and sharing and having a good time, then the network takes off. I'm not saying politics isn't important. I'm saying it can't become the miasma that pervades the entire service and makes the entire point of the social network complaining about politics, polarized attacks, etc.

angoragoats 6mo ago
[flagged]
- Forgeties79 6mo ago
  “Too political” usually means “not my politics” IME.
  - angoragoats 6mo ago
    Maybe? But that doesn't really have much to do with my point.
    - Forgeties79 6mo ago
      I was agreeing with you
- viccis 6mo ago
  >Twitter is a haven for people who are fans of generating non-consensual porn of others, white supremacy/white nationalism, murder of innocent civilians, and other reprehensible things. It's really not. It's where everyone is right now. The Trots and Maoists. The demsoc local politicians. The vegan militant organizers. Etc. You can also include whatever shitty group you want to cherry pick to make your disingenuous ass argument. And when you do, post it to Bluesky where people can get a dopamine rush with you as they shake their heads and smile and post how horrible it is.
  - angoragoats 6mo ago
    Based on this reply and others, it seems Twitter is frying your brain and you should probably stop using it. Care to actually refute my point instead of saying “nuh uh” and lobbing some childish insults my way?
    - viccis 6mo ago
      I never claimed to actively use Twitter anywhere in here.
      - angoragoats 6mo ago
        That still doesn't actually address my argument. And I assumed you did, since you said "It's where everyone is right now" (which is objectively false). So, as an aside, do you actively use Twitter? Or are you going to dodge that too?
viccis 6mo ago
Bluesky is political because their invite-only on-boarding process for months meant that only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in. By the time your average person who just wanted to stop seeing ads about Great Replacement Theory or whatever found their way into Bluesky, it was chock full of furry art, "fandom" posting from teenagers on the spectrum, and political rambling from people who haven't touched grass since puberty.
- angoragoats 6mo ago
  How does having a really tightly controlled and/or lengthy invite period translate into the user base being of one particular political viewpoint? I'm not seeing the causal link. Even if I take at face value your claim that "only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in," I still don't see how these subgroups or subcultures would necessarily have the same political views.
  - viccis 6mo ago
    Well it self selected for left wing ones. My point is normal people who aren't extremely online and part of 10 Discord servers with an internet friend network who can hook them up with an invite didn't get into Bluesky. Instead the people who, well, did, got the invites. Obviously the extremely online right didn't because they had other places to go and weren't welcomed by the bsky admins.
    - cestith 6mo ago
      Twitter going so far right helped select Bluesky and Mastodon moving further left.
    - angoragoats 6mo ago
      “Well it self selected for left wing ones” didn’t answer my question in the least, so I’ll just assume your claim is false.
      - 6mo ago

acdha 6mo ago

It was worse than that: they forced _everyone_ into it, whether or not you had any interest in using it. They did this before having notification control or usable filtering[1] so what this meant was for most of year, you'd login to Gmail and see the upper right notification badge be !!!LOOK AT ME!!! red only to click on it and see it was telling you that some dude who no-showed on a Craigslist sale 10 years ago in a different city had been forced to “join” Google+. Even worse, it took like 6 months for their iOS developers to give you any control over push notifications so you got all of that as push notifications until you deleted the app. They also annoyed key communities like Google Reader users: that wasn't their largest popular social network but it was one which people actually liked and it disproportionately skewed towards people like journalists, bloggers, etc. who recommended technology to other people. The conversion to Google+ was really clumsy and they did things like replacing the popular Reader commenting system with a Google+ “integration” which didn't work at all on mobile devices[2], which meant that a ton of influential people had a really negative experience and told everyone they knew about it. 1. The “circles” idea reportedly worked well when it was Google employees using it internally but it relied on the poster picking an audience for a post, which failed in the real world when the spammiest people think everyone is interested in their every word. 2. The dialog was sized for a desktop display so the post button was inaccessible off the screen.