“Google just started mass banning/limiting Archive Team downloads”
twitter.com
twitter.com
http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/
(the graphs show up in the pink block at the bottom, which can take a while to render)
Where is the graph in the tweet from? If it's just measuring successful downloads, how did it conclude that it's Google at fault? Is there another tracker of download failures that shows quota errors/DOS blocking etc?
Workarounds are applied, but Google not fighting us would be a Really Nice Thing presently.
(Google's performance throughout this episode has been ... poor.)
The tracker is also only very partial, showing about 1/50th of all activity at any one time.
A better picture is at the Grafana tracker:
https://atdash.meo.ws/d/BQbN9QEiz/archive-team-tracker-chart...
Edit: I see the post a few days ago said about 80%, that's at least something.
As I keep suggesting, these big companies each need their own internal ombudsman, because at the moment they provide no way to fix things when their systems have gone crazy.
The other reason (big companies X/Y/Z) need to each have an internal ombudsman is that it's getting tedious reading on Hacker News about how (big company X/Y/Z) has done something crazy and the user/developer/customer cannot get it fixed.
Maybe its an entrepreneurial opportunity - someone could make a website that pays a fee to someone with Google/Microsoft/Amazon who is willing to use their influence to solve a crazy problem. "Rent a manager friend at Google".
I don't have time to implement it but if you like it go ahead and steal it.
Basically a Hacker News style-site for complaining about companies that don't fix their problems or own their support issues and their user base can upvote them to embarrass them into actually fixing the problem.
thingsarebadat.com
It's Sunday afternoon, the much more likely explanation is that it's an automated system, or something broke.
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9ulvr0/dear_googl...
That was submitted to multiple channels on G+, to the Google Press email address, and through numerous Googler contacts. No response (though many of the issues were, and often only in the past few weeks and days, addressed, though others never were).
It's been exceedingly difficult to get any response, and that's included what's effectively been a war against us by much of the Google+ Help community moderators. Google shut down the Communities on Google+ itself for Community owners and moderators, in one case for six weeks with no notice at all, in another, with at best a few hours' notice.
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/aev39g/google_shu...
The details of this sort of behaviour tend toward petty and tedious, but that's precisely what's been seen:
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9wi6sg/a_curiosit...
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/agm2j6/banned_fro...
Google didn't even bother putting shutdown notice on their G+ app and About pages (the latter still doesn't say anything):
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/ae5lsv/failure_of...
________________________________
Notes:
1. I've made (or inspired) several estimates of total Google+ user activity, beginning in 2015 using the services own sitemaps to show that only 9% of profiles were active at all and that a fraction of a percent could be considered regular public posters. That's not all Google+ activity, but it's a very, very large share of it.
Stone Temple Consulting's follow-up study, based on my methods, looking at 500,000 profiles, gives a pretty solid view, and showed 50-100k highly active posters. There's a fair bit of churn at the top due to spam accounts:
https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...
Further information:
A Change.org petition has 38,580 signatures presently: https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-shut-down-google-p...
The Pluspora pod of Diaspora has 12,000 members.
Other signs of activity (and expanding to include non-English native speakers) probably doubles the petition and Pluspora numbers (largely English-speaking, at least as a second language).
“Google’s attention is not required. Everything is working as intended” as Google blocks Archive Team
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/b87hpi/googles_at...
Is that even a thing?
Google doesn't seem to want to be talk'n to outside of my information and in some cases credit card.
1. Get lucky and some googler sees your official bug report
2. Know a googler who can file a bug internally
3. Make noise on social media till someone at Google notices
My brother is disabled and hadn't logged into his Gmail account for a few months.
I helped him log in, which somehow triggered some kind of security system. It thought we were hacking the account. We got stuck in an infinite loop of "verify your 2FA, answer personal questions, wait for customer support to review the situation, repeat".
It was hellish. We tried over and over again for months to get back in. I still even had access to the Gmail account that sent him the original invite. But when no human will review the situation, you can't break out of the loop.
The only way we got his email account back was by talking to one of my friends who works at Google.
Expecting something for free is exactly what leads to being ghosted, whether by a person (see the lament of the GNOME Calendar maintainer that was up here earlier) or a company.
If you can’t support a service, don’t offer it.
How can I be clearer.
Repeating something does not make it clearer nor more convincing.
The relative badness between paid and free is irrelevant.
Have you honestly never seen one of the stories about how badly google treats paying customers, and specifically how automated it all is? I can do the job of searching that if you need me to, but I'm not going to argue about free vs. paid because that's not the topic at hand.
Furthermore, sporadic blog posts/tweets here and there are not indicative of how the vast majority of users feel about this service. Especially paid users who generally are too busy adding value to complain.
It’s worth remembering what email was like before Gmail came around. With their spam analysis they basically fixed email and moved the world towards a simpler web ui for email (as opposed to hotmail etc. of the day).
I do not work for Google or any Alphabet company.
And excuse me, your comments gave me the impression that you were.
What’s more, the lack of humanity is completely unrelated to lack of legality and lack of desire for income. Both of which Google have mostly adhered to (unlike e.g. Facebook, Uber, AirBnB).
You were asking about free vs. paid in a way that would provide no value to the discussion except to discredit a particular anecdote. But that's a distraction from the real problem, the inability to get good support, and that anecdote was just an example and not necessary as proof.
I say your criteria are irrelevant because the answer doesn't change the root complaint at all.
> Especially paid users who generally are too busy adding value to complain.
Adding value to what? I have doubt in that argument for email which usually costs a couple dollars a month. It's not a thousand dollar product that excludes amateurs. And the problem is not the typical user, it's the one that gets banned suddenly. If that happens the more value you're making by doing business over email, the worse it gets!
And none of your points about gmail being useful are relevant to support either.
Beyond just that point I think a critical dependence on these services, mixed with a general tech illiteracy and an uncaring corporation is a dangerous situation to be in. One could argue that it's the user who is responsible for maintaining access to their email account, but the reality is that the vast majority of users are not educated in these areas and absolutely need help. A corporation that won't help them use the services they provide deserves to be replaced by one that will -- unfortunately, Google is so dominant that the chance of someone seeking out and finding ProtonMail or rolling their own server is tiny. It's hard to compete with Gmail, even when you have options like ProtonMail which provide excellent customer service (with phone numbers!)
I'm just thinking out loud. It seems like a problem to me. Dunno how to solve it.
In that particular case, I would've paid $1,000 for a Google investigator to spend 10 min verifying the account.
None of those options are available at any price.
And every paid service I've ever used has at least email support. Gmail has nothing.
We have our own internal list in case we have a major issue. It's just something we keep in the toolchest that's cheaper (and faster!) than poking the lawyer or relying on a blog post to go viral. They don't want to act like a normal company with regular support and escalation channels, so we have no intention of treating them like a normal company.
I need to start thinking about proper storage system for my pictures and other data.
Though local control of your own data, plus reliable and secure off-site replication, helps a lot.
I'm strongly partial to git-based publishing tools -- SSGs and markdown hosted on the site of my choice, though GitLab and GitHub are both convenient options.
The fact that everything is in Git makes rehoming vastly simpler. And I've been bit a few times too many by service shutdowns, with about three consequential projects still in process (the earliest, Readability's shutdown, is over 2 years ago, and I'm still digging out).
When I was as Tumblr we were just as helpless and subject to the whims of Googlebot as a mom and pop. One day Google decided to ramp up our Googlebot rate ten times. This significant because they were already a double-digit percentage of our traffic, so going 10x placed an unexpected and worrisome strain on our backends. They only way we could get them to throttle back was through personal contacts people had with people over there. We didn’t want to tweet out to them and advertise we were under stress because it would bring out all the weirdos to ddos us (we even had to adopt rules to not talk about company holidays and offsites until after they happened because people would monitor our blogs and ramp up their bots when they thought we were out of the office)
Adopting Kubernetes at my current employer we had many discussions about going with AWS or Google Cloud. What it always came down to is AWS has support where we can write/chat/phone someone at any time and get a solution to your problem, and Google Cloud can only offer our account rep’s email address.
On consumer side, if you buy Google drive you get phone, email, and chat for all questions. Google Fi is the same.
But, some years back when I discovered problems with an online service of theirs, I cold called the switchboard, asked for the VP of the business unit, who picked up on the first ring, chatted for a few minutes, told me to expect a call from the product manager, who rang within 15 minutes, and worked with me for 6 weeks as they addressed (and I monitored) the problem, to satifaactory resolution.
Entirely unlike Google.
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/b87hpi/googles_at...
Saving of public Google+ content at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine by the Archive Team has begun
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/az285j/saving_of_...
Previously on HN:
A Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier[1] is a hellhole.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/185435/diary-of-a-n...
I've yet to see these things happen to HN.
Roughly 2.6M views a day, 300K daily uniques, 3 to 3.5M monthly uniques. It depends on how you count, of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098
Which ... actually probably compares favourably with Google+, which had a core of about 50-100k highly active users (posting 50-100x monthly), and maybe an extended set of as much as 100 million who'd interacted with the site at one time or another significantly.
I've done a fair bit of measurement (limited by available resources and indicators), and one conclusion I'm coming to is that raw numbers do a pathetic job of indicating media or forum vitality. Most especially raw census numbers.
Looking at G+ communities, and running grid plots of engagements, it turned out that posts drove other engagement, not members, and in fact it seems as if there's some kind of fall-off (at least on a per-member basis) when a given forum gets above about 5,000 members (though I need to check this).
Google had more users. But they were spread out over a vastly larger set of forums and discussion, there was no central "square" (as with HN's "new" or "news" pages), moderation was exceedingly uneven, and often entirely absent, and there were (and remain) huge barriers for like minds to come together.
HN's overall focus is fairly (but not excessively) narrow, and much of the conversation takes itself too seriously (and certainly myself), but relative to the rest of the Net it's an exemplar. Good conversation remains exceedingly hard to find.
Yes, this was something particular to G+. Incidentally see these in Linus interview [0], HN post [1]
" The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control"
"I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere)"
[0] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/25-years-later-intervie...
It has been proven again and again, over thousands of year but especially recently that the real valuable data is often in the raw notes of a research and not the published material. git allows you, very easily, to destroy history just to make the log prettier later. Instead, it should allow you to construct a hierarchy of logs and hide the nonimportant details but allow it to be shown later. Similarly, git reset --hard should not throw away work, that's criminal https://gist.github.com/chx/85db0ebed1e02ab14b1a65b6024dea29 fixes it but bah.
Back to topic: when there are hundreds of thousands of public posts, the mind boggles you are asking whether there's any value to it. There's no question some of it is valueable. I do not know how to impress this mindset where losing information created by people is henious, unthinkable.
That said, the company's proved less than helpful to date in the process of the G+ shutdown.
And incompetence is difficult to distinguish from malevolence.
I mean, it's a reasonable suggestion, but it doesn't work
They now have a phone number and actively pick up the phone to imply you'll never get any support.
How would you go about contacting Google? As far an I've ever heard they're notoriously impossible to contact by anyone who isn't paying large amounts to run ads.
I guess sometimes Google does this kind of crap just to prove (mostly to themselves) that they can. Truly, the bully of the internet.
However, it's clear that for an archiving effort this big, people at Google are explicitly allowing it. The user agents and fetch patterns of the Archive Team crawler were clearly distinct enough to get caught by an automated tool, and someone knew someone at Google in order to get it unblocked.
Unfortunately, any archival effort that requires the "Warrior" crawler (and not just a guy with a 4TB disk) is at the mercy of the website's remaining staff and management. Just ask Soundcloud. Archive Team started to archive their stuff when it looked like they were going to go under, but Soundcloud shut them down.
For Google+ itself, over a period of years, I'd hammered it with 100s to ~100k requests from residential IP space without ever throwing rate-limiting, at a rate of 2-20 queries/second or so, roughly.
We've started getting news of rate limiting over the past few months as archival activity has proceeded.
This seems....highly unlikely for Google.
The service itself will continue as a paid product "G Suite Google+".
Context comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539373
The core G+ userbase was vastly smaller.
(I've done, and am continuing to do, estimation of that.)
There were 3.4 billion profiles, about 110-120 million ever posted anything publicly, but it was a much smaller core of 50-100k who were posting 50-100 times monthly (roughly 1-3x daily). And I figure a large share of that was span churn (the 50-100k was basically a month's worth of activity, and the attrition rate of active profiles was high).
We're collecting metrics of active G+ users through the shutdown, and that's, various:
4650 or so registered to the Google+ Mass Migration community on G+ (main migration community), since October 2018. (I'm a mod/owner).
12,000 at Pluspora (since Sept 2018)
38,000 signed the Change.org petition.
MeWe and a few other sites claim upwards of 10,000 G+ registrations, though they don't give sources or retention rates. Given that you have to sign in just to see content that's ... probably inflated.
Exodus communities in various places tend to be in the tens to 100s of members, from what I've seen (and again, I've been compiling sets).
This all skews heavily English-language speaking (though not necessarily native), and G+ was huge among Spanish, Arabic, Indonesian, Japanese, and Chinese speakers based on some indicators (mostly Community titles -- I've archive 8.1 million of those).
Upshot: if G Suite hits 10k or so members, that's an appreciable fraction of the core community G+ base, and might be more strongly motivated to use and like the product. Though of course, it's not public Internet.
(I'm frankly not a fan, but I do have a good sense of the numbers.)
[1] https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
There's a bunch of folks who are interested in preserving content from the site. Some personally/individually, a whole host of communities, and, well, because their mission is to preserve the world's data, the Internet Archive and an unaffiliated though closely-working group, the Archive Team: https://archiveteam.org
That's a bunch of volunteers who basically suck the guts out of failing websites, and they've got some big ambitions.
I'm from the Google+ user community side and have been helping organise information and activity on behalf of others. There's a pretty comprehensive (and messy) wiki at https://social.antefriguserat.de with FAQs and directories and guidance and a whole bunch of other stuff, plus other resources -- G+ communities, subreddits, and more.
We (the G+ community side) stumbled across Archive Team this past January and were delighted to discover they existed. (They've told us they're also glad they exist.) And we've been working together to coordinate this pull, with AT providing the technical capabilities -- code, servers, bandwidth, and storage -- and us mostly pestering them with questions but also knowing a good bit about the characteristics of Google+ data and some of its organisation. (I've made a hobby of ... measuring much of that.) I was finally able to answer my mother's persistent question "but who cares about any of this" with "arkiver, of the Archive Team".
Anyway: the Archive Team grab is in full swing, we've got about 24-48 hours left, depending on when Google shut shit down, and all of a sudden all the archiving agents ("Warriors") stop collecting data. We're 86% through the working set, and are on track to complete 92% of all scheduled data requests by the earliest anticipated shutdown window. (Earlier estimates, before the throttling, were over 100% completion, meaning we had some slack space.)
Answer your question?