He's not "seriously upset" about the photo. He thinks what's happening is ridiculous, and therefore took the time to ridicule it. He's clearly right. But it's not a moral crusade.
The question is not is why does Siegler care. He can reasonably expect to care: it's his photo attached to his personal profile and his photo is part of how he chooses to portray himself online. Siegler now knows that he cannot be himself on Google+, and now thousands of others know that they cannot be themselves on Google+ either.
The question is: why does Google care so much that about the minutae of how individuals choose to portray themselves while they face much greater problems related to the success or otherwise of their new social network?
Putting aside the spam problems that render Google+ at best noisy and at worse useless, if Google is so intolerant that it silently censors a hand gesture considered impolite in where their HQ is based, how else will they behave? Will they censor every gesture that might be considered offensive somewhere in the world (there are many)? Or will they remain purely focused on the North American hand gestures, and, by extension, North American culture and the limited audience that it brings?
When you're dealing with a really massive user base, you're inevitably going to have a lot of people that would find an image of a guy flipping the bird to be horribly offensive (their heads would simply explode if they ever saw goatse). Should you cater to those people? Where do you draw the line? Do you go with the U.S. Supreme Court's definition of obscenity? Siegler's picture is certainly not obscene, but it would certainly make a prude think twice about signing up for G+. I would rather not cater to the prudes of the world, but if Google wants every person with access to the internet on G+, then they'll have to offer some concessions to them.
It's a finger for fuck's sake. It's not hurting anyone. If you're offended by it you really need to grow up and stop living in 19th century Victorian England.
Yes, pictures of dicks and gore is disgusting, but a finger? That's just childish, and reacting to that is also childish.
The adult thing is to just ignore it.
The amount of moralizing over what people are "allowed" to find offensive here is amazing. If it were my network, I wouldn't give a rat's ass what MG was doing in his picture, but it isn't my network.
Almost any business that is targeted at a mass audience understands this and governs their products accordingly. If you find their censorship to be prudish and ridiculous, you can boycott them and use the Fuck You Network. I suppose if enough people boycott G+ for being unreasonably prudish, maybe they'll change their position, but judging by past performance, it seems like the prudes win these fights. Social networks are not like content distributors like HBO, that can appeal to a relatively small niche and be successful, for G+ it's all or nothing.
http://theangrydrunk.com/2011/11/15/fuck-you-google
It's just one big circle. Oh wait! Doesn't Google+ have circles? And so it goes ... :)
Well, I've got news for you. Not everyone has the same threshold for tolerance of offensive material. Maybe the middle finger is devastating to me, but I love seeing gore. Who are you to tell me that's childish?
There are rules. Even HN has a set. If you don't like them, don't play.
It's not about this, it's about setting your rules for your property. You want to use a service, you agree to terms of use.
Imagine someone painted a giant middle finger on your house wall, how would you feel about that?
So if it would in the slightest bother you, then don't bother doing it.
The MG criticism is over the top, as expected, since G+ is far more "public" out of the gate than previous networks it needs to be more proactive rather than reactive. As FB becomes more public they will begin to grapple with the same issues, it's only a matter of time...
MC Siegler and his fans are completely and totally allowed to share pictures of them fingering at each other (that came out wrong, but I'm leaving it for posterity) in private circles on G+, aren't they? But Google doesn't want it in people's public feeds.
I don't find it offensive--I do find it stupid in that sort of "oh, look at the Internet Tough Guy" way, but that's a far cry from taking offense--but at the same time I can entirely get why Google wouldn't be all happy and such with that sort of picture in folks' public feeds. Like it or not, there are some venues where you get to be a little civilized if you want to be out in public, and Google's decided that they have a bit of a dress code in their neck of the woods: shirt optional, pants optional, tie not required, birds verboten. Not a big deal; the total of this tragedy is pretty much that MC Siegler will have to resort to other methods than a bird in a profile picture to show what a trendy rebel with his fingers on the pulse of Technoeverything he really is.
Maybe he could do it with a thoughtful, well-written, incisive arti...ahahahahaha. I made myself laugh. =)
That's the adult thing for him to do. But the adult thing for the rest of us to do is mind our own business. If I start to start a conversation with someone but find their speech offends me, I walk away. If his picture offends you, just take him off your feed. No big deal.
He, and you, and I, have no inherent right to do whatever we want on a private service. Their house, their rules. Maybe he should start his own social network (with blackjack, and...). He can call it CrunchPlaid. =)
I don't really see many people not minding their business, though. I see a few (including me) saying "meh, it's Google's house, they choose the rules", and that's about it.
If flipping the bird isn't an adult thing to do, clearly the users are not adults. So the guardians have to clean up after them, as is customary.
Heck, apple has made a lot of money by taking that stance. Why shouldn't Google emulate it?
Rather than removing profile images they should offer optional filtering there, too.
"But this is who I really am, and it's how I want to portray myself in public!"
It's Google's playground, and you either play by the rules or suffer the consequences. You wouldn't berate mall cops if they had to remove offensive people from the premises.
I don't think anyone is insisting that there are no types of images that are so bad that it wouldn't be ok for Google to remove them. At least I haven't seen anyone claim so.
As long as that is the case, using examples that the vast majority would agree are worse than the one that was actually taken down just weakens your point dramatically.
Now we are just arguing about where the line is.
No, but one can disagree with both Google and the general public.
It's Google's playground, and you either play by the rules or suffer the consequences.
That doesn't mean we can't publicly disagree with the rules.
You wouldn't berate mall cops if they had to remove offensive people from the premises.
Mall cops don't decide the rules, they just apply them. It's different.
If you are in favor of Google treating their site like a public space then Google is doing very poorly.
(It’s a stupid comparison that gets us nowhere.)
It would be easy to justify NOT removing it, even if EVERYONE else found it offensive. There's an option to not follow/view his profile. Under your view, the only votes would be those who found the picture offensive. If the criteria to remove something is that more than one person finds it offensive, almost everything on the internet would be removed.
A (much) better solution is that items that are flagged as potentially offensive come with a warning. Google+ users could choose the level they're comfortable with, much like they do with Google's search results. They deserve to be called out for making an arbitrary decision here, on something so trivial.
Reductionist strawman. While a middle finger may not be particularly offensive to most people (including me), more people are likely to be offended by it than are likely to get their knickers in a twist over such a photo being removed. Ergo, it gets removed.
Waste time with warnings about offensive content and blah-blah-derpa-blah? No. Your potentially-offensive content can be kept in private circles and you can exercise good judgement about what you make public. That is the better solution. (And just in case--save the "well, what is offensive, how do we know?" silliness. That little brat Siegler knew perfectly well that he was doing something stupid and possibly/probably in contravention of Google's rules. Anderson called him out on it, too.)
That line of reasoning is flawed, especially since there's no way to vote that you're not offended (other than the original person posting). That's an absurd system, where only the offended can voice their opinion. Even if those not offended could vote, who would vote on everything they're not offended by. That's still silly. Any system that attempts to allow people to vote/flag offensive material is inherently flawed.
That leaves us (or really Google) with an arbitrary decision on what should be allowed and what should be banned. Asking me (or anyone else) to save the "well, what is offensive" argument is silly. That's the WHOLE point. It's an arbitrary decision, one we all might come to different conclusions on. That underlines my point, that it's an arbitrary decision, and one that's been made for no good reason, given a system where you don't have to follow MG on Google+. There's a natural option (and given your obvious attitude on Mr. Siegler, the one you'll likely take), just don't follow him or look at his Google+ page. There's no reason to remove the content, and Google should be called out for it. MG might have over-reacted, and might be worthy of being called out too. I'm only calling out the system of "voting" to determine what's offensive. That's just a silly system.
"It doesn't meet the standards of public discourse G+ is made for." Blam. Done.
I don't know why everyone is making it sound like this sets a precedent for more "censoring" when this is already the standard for any currently popular social network.
It sounds like you disagree with this though. Why? Why do you think he should have kept his mouth shut?
"this is already the standard for any currently popular social network"
And it will remain so, if people don't complain loudly enough that an alternative is created which behaves differently.
Your general statements don't apply here. If you want to argue, then tell me why you want to see people flicking you off on G+ and why you think that's something that should be OK for everyone.
Just because you disagree with somebodys opinion, doesn't mean they were wrong to express it.
However, the point I'm making is, all things considered, I don't think he had much of an argument for this case, and it's more of just a cheap shot at G+ (he could have instead addressed it to all social networks instead of G+ too..). He kind of has a track record for these things though..
I already use Google+ far more than Facebook, but they keep stepping in it and making me less and less hopeful about it being long term viable as a replacement.
It has nothing to do with wanting to see people flicking someone off, but with not wanting to see Google take the role of moral censor and deciding for us what's "offensive" or not.
It is clearly ridiculous for Google to be policing profile photos looking for people flipping other people the bird.
Right? Wrong? Who cares? It's ridiculous. It can't possibly work. By doing it, Google sends a message that they're fundamentally unserious about taking on Facebook. Nobody who's serious could possibly have the time to deal with stuff like this. It's like Facebook banning cartoon profile pictures --- which is the kind of thing you can sort of do when you're the social network for a bunch of colleges, but couldn't even consider doing when you're the default social network for the entire world.
If there's one company that doesn't usually use humans to do any kind of spam filtering, it's probably Google. Also, I'm pretty sure they'd work out the kinks eventually.
While I can't claim to know for certain exactly what content Facebook moderates, it most certainly does moderate. Is it purely a coincidence that the entire ecosystem on FB is noticeably 'cleaner' than its predecessor MySpace?
But just letting anyone do anything is not a good approach. The small minority who will get up in arms about such a thing is nothing compared to the masses that will leave when they decide that the anything goes approach has allowed G+ to become a cesspool like MySpace.