6 ms·

can you please explain the ways in which G+ is not usable? while it's got less users than FB, it's afaik generally perceived as far more user friendly, well des

can you please explain the ways in which G+ is not usable? while it's got less users than FB, it's afaik generally perceived as far more user friendly, well designed, and feature-ful

fleitz 13y ago
> it's got less users than FB. It's like a cellphone that you cant call anyone with. No one really cares if it's 1000 times easier to use if you can't call your friends. They took something benign but useless and made it non-consensual. Google+ is now the equivalent of all the cable channels you didn't want but your cable co made you buy anyway. I was an early adopter of G+ because I didn't like the heavy handed BS from FB. I still begrudgingly use FB because alot of my friends are on it.
- freehunter 13y ago
  I use G+ because none of my friends are there. I'm able to hear from interesting or influential voices of people who choose to blog or share on G+. Since there's little danger of my mom, my pastor, or my boss wishing to be friends with me, I can feel freer to speak my mind as well. To me, G+ having a niche audience is a feature.
  - alexanderh 13y ago
    I totally agree. Its like twitter with no character limit. And instead of celebrities and famous people, its intellectuals, academia and influential people in tech that you can follow. People hate on Google+ way too much without even really giving it a fair chance. Its very useful and flexible, it is what you make of it.
  - zaidf 13y ago
    To me, G+ having a niche audience is a feature. That's not a feature, it's a bug that google is trying to fix by shoving g+ down everyone's throat.
    - ryanhuff 13y ago
      I guess one man's bug can be another man's feature.
- 21echoes 13y ago
  completely valid point (which i addressed in my comment), but also completely separate from your initial complaint of "why not make it usable?"?
- AlexMax 13y ago
  > It's like a cellphone that you cant call anyone with. No one really cares if it's 1000 times easier to use if you can't call your friends. And now you know why they're unifying their account system under Google+. Being able to include everyone who has ever had a YouTube or GMail account in their social network means that suddenly, people you know _are_ on Google+. This is nothing new. This is basically the sequel to the YouTube -> Google Account transition that happened a few years ago, except this time it's in a post Google Reader shutdown world so Google is no longer the darling of Hacker News and Reddit commenters.
Geee 13y ago
Because both of them suck. They suck thousand times more when they try to reach outside of their native environment, like third-party Facebook comments or third-party sign up with Facebook/G+. The problem is that both G+ and Facebook try to be the 'ecosystem of the web', and that's wrong and everyone hates that.
faboo 13y ago
I don't know about the rest of G+, but since the integration, I've been unable to comment on YouTube videos with my G+ account, something that worked fine before. I'd certainly call that "not usable".
- eco 13y ago
  I too couldn't leave comments. It took me awhile to figure out it was because I was blocking third party cookies. Apparently the new G+ comments on YouTube rely on them.
antihero 13y ago
Did they sort out the "forcing you to use real names" thing yet? A lot of people have very good reasons for not wanting to expose their real identity to every community Google eats up.
chilldream 13y ago
Here's a non-exhaustive list of annoyances just off the top of my head: - The site uses a lot of JavaScript but seems to assume everything will be loaded immediately. I've had days where my connection is slower than usual and the page looks like it's loaded even though it hasn't. The worst part is that the links are some of the last things to load, and the "everything in a tiny box" layout means I can't actually do anything meaningful without clicking a link. - The site puts everything in tiny boxes and assumes that you want to view everything in that same tiny box. Actually, maybe they've eased up on this lately and I just looked and it doesn't seem as bad as it used to be, but clicking on a YouTube video in my notification feed still plays the video in my notification feed, which is brain-damaged. - I thought the two-column layout was a ludicrous waste of space (and it confuses me anyway because there's no obvious pageflow), so I switched to the one-column layout. The one-column layout uses the same column width as the two-column layout. - The sidebar on the left is apparently engineered to be as confusing as possible. It's autohidden even though it could be visible if the overall layout didn't have so much gratuitous blank space. The way you get to it is by hovering over what looks like a dropdown. If you mouse over to what looks like a dropdown and immediately click it before you realize that the UI is lying to you and it's not a dropdown, you'll accidentally go "Home" because that's what appears under your mouse. Even if that space said something else before you moused over it! (FWIW, Facebook isn't too wrapped up in their own cleverness to realize that maybe a sidebar should just be a sidebar) - I was about to say that the site may be optimized for mobile at the expense of those of us using computers, but the iOS app isn't better. I haven't used it in awhile and have apparently blocked it out of my mind, but it's annoyed me in some way nearly every time I've used it, and in fact I have a notification that I'm not getting rid of right now because it would require me to use the stupid thing. Yeah, I realize they probably put more work into the Android app for obvious reasons, but c'mon (I guess it's better than the YouTube app, which I deleted after discovering that it apparently only wanted to play videos in portrait orientation, upside-down) - A regular occurrence: "You have X notifications" (click notifications feed) "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work. In fact, no joke, this just happened, just now: Sign into YouTube from being completely signed out. Click notification feed. "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work. - Speaking of YouTube, someone had the bright idea that there should be no character limit on posts, but that the only collapse link should be at the bottom of the post. "Just enough text to trigger an expand link followed by the full text of a public domain novel" is now the funniest troll I've ever seen. - I started using my G+ account for real because of one community. It's literally the only thing I'm ever interested in when I visit the site. The first five or six times at least I couldn't figure out a better way to find the community than typing its name into the search bar. Even though I was following it and it was the only thing I was following. After that my desperate ad-hoc fix was to unsubscribe from all the autogenerated "What's Hot" type garbage figuring that at least one post from that community would be in my feed. - I can't find a "no, I will not spam all my friends, stop interrupting me every time I log in with a full screen splash page to ask me you jerks" button (FWIW, I used Hangouts recently and I actually liked it. In fact I had to use it all of once to prefer it to Skype. That's the worst part about this G+ fiasco; it's not just that I think G+ is bad, it's that Google's insistence on equating "unified login" with "Facebook knockoff that you will join or else" has singlehandedly caused me to hate the company to a degree that even I wouldn't have expected a year ago. I actually think it's too bad that Google's worked so hard to turn themselves into an anti-brand.)

can you please explain the ways in which G+ is not usable? while it's got less users than FB, it's afaik generally perceived as far more user friendly, well designed, and feature-ful

fleitz 13y ago

> it's got less users than FB. It's like a cellphone that you cant call anyone with. No one really cares if it's 1000 times easier to use if you can't call your friends. They took something benign but useless and made it non-consensual. Google+ is now the equivalent of all the cable channels you didn't want but your cable co made you buy anyway. I was an early adopter of G+ because I didn't like the heavy handed BS from FB. I still begrudgingly use FB because alot of my friends are on it.

freehunter 13y ago
I use G+ because none of my friends are there. I'm able to hear from interesting or influential voices of people who choose to blog or share on G+. Since there's little danger of my mom, my pastor, or my boss wishing to be friends with me, I can feel freer to speak my mind as well. To me, G+ having a niche audience is a feature.
- alexanderh 13y ago
  I totally agree. Its like twitter with no character limit. And instead of celebrities and famous people, its intellectuals, academia and influential people in tech that you can follow. People hate on Google+ way too much without even really giving it a fair chance. Its very useful and flexible, it is what you make of it.
- zaidf 13y ago
  To me, G+ having a niche audience is a feature. That's not a feature, it's a bug that google is trying to fix by shoving g+ down everyone's throat.
  - ryanhuff 13y ago
    I guess one man's bug can be another man's feature.
21echoes 13y ago
completely valid point (which i addressed in my comment), but also completely separate from your initial complaint of "why not make it usable?"?
AlexMax 13y ago
> It's like a cellphone that you cant call anyone with. No one really cares if it's 1000 times easier to use if you can't call your friends. And now you know why they're unifying their account system under Google+. Being able to include everyone who has ever had a YouTube or GMail account in their social network means that suddenly, people you know _are_ on Google+. This is nothing new. This is basically the sequel to the YouTube -> Google Account transition that happened a few years ago, except this time it's in a post Google Reader shutdown world so Google is no longer the darling of Hacker News and Reddit commenters.

Geee 13y ago

Because both of them suck. They suck thousand times more when they try to reach outside of their native environment, like third-party Facebook comments or third-party sign up with Facebook/G+. The problem is that both G+ and Facebook try to be the 'ecosystem of the web', and that's wrong and everyone hates that.

faboo 13y ago

I don't know about the rest of G+, but since the integration, I've been unable to comment on YouTube videos with my G+ account, something that worked fine before. I'd certainly call that "not usable".

eco 13y ago
I too couldn't leave comments. It took me awhile to figure out it was because I was blocking third party cookies. Apparently the new G+ comments on YouTube rely on them.

antihero 13y ago

Did they sort out the "forcing you to use real names" thing yet? A lot of people have very good reasons for not wanting to expose their real identity to every community Google eats up.

chilldream 13y ago

Here's a non-exhaustive list of annoyances just off the top of my head: - The site uses a lot of JavaScript but seems to assume everything will be loaded immediately. I've had days where my connection is slower than usual and the page looks like it's loaded even though it hasn't. The worst part is that the links are some of the last things to load, and the "everything in a tiny box" layout means I can't actually do anything meaningful without clicking a link. - The site puts everything in tiny boxes and assumes that you want to view everything in that same tiny box. Actually, maybe they've eased up on this lately and I just looked and it doesn't seem as bad as it used to be, but clicking on a YouTube video in my notification feed still plays the video in my notification feed, which is brain-damaged. - I thought the two-column layout was a ludicrous waste of space (and it confuses me anyway because there's no obvious pageflow), so I switched to the one-column layout. The one-column layout uses the same column width as the two-column layout. - The sidebar on the left is apparently engineered to be as confusing as possible. It's autohidden even though it could be visible if the overall layout didn't have so much gratuitous blank space. The way you get to it is by hovering over what looks like a dropdown. If you mouse over to what looks like a dropdown and immediately click it before you realize that the UI is lying to you and it's not a dropdown, you'll accidentally go "Home" because that's what appears under your mouse. Even if that space said something else before you moused over it! (FWIW, Facebook isn't too wrapped up in their own cleverness to realize that maybe a sidebar should just be a sidebar) - I was about to say that the site may be optimized for mobile at the expense of those of us using computers, but the iOS app isn't better. I haven't used it in awhile and have apparently blocked it out of my mind, but it's annoyed me in some way nearly every time I've used it, and in fact I have a notification that I'm not getting rid of right now because it would require me to use the stupid thing. Yeah, I realize they probably put more work into the Android app for obvious reasons, but c'mon (I guess it's better than the YouTube app, which I deleted after discovering that it apparently only wanted to play videos in portrait orientation, upside-down) - A regular occurrence: "You have X notifications" (click notifications feed) "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work. In fact, no joke, this just happened, just now: Sign into YouTube from being completely signed out. Click notification feed. "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work. - Speaking of YouTube, someone had the bright idea that there should be no character limit on posts, but that the only collapse link should be at the bottom of the post. "Just enough text to trigger an expand link followed by the full text of a public domain novel" is now the funniest troll I've ever seen. - I started using my G+ account for real because of one community. It's literally the only thing I'm ever interested in when I visit the site. The first five or six times at least I couldn't figure out a better way to find the community than typing its name into the search bar. Even though I was following it and it was the only thing I was following. After that my desperate ad-hoc fix was to unsubscribe from all the autogenerated "What's Hot" type garbage figuring that at least one post from that community would be in my feed. - I can't find a "no, I will not spam all my friends, stop interrupting me every time I log in with a full screen splash page to ask me you jerks" button (FWIW, I used Hangouts recently and I actually liked it. In fact I had to use it all of once to prefer it to Skype. That's the worst part about this G+ fiasco; it's not just that I think G+ is bad, it's that Google's insistence on equating "unified login" with "Facebook knockoff that you will join or else" has singlehandedly caused me to hate the company to a degree that even I wouldn't have expected a year ago. I actually think it's too bad that Google's worked so hard to turn themselves into an anti-brand.)