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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

Your point-by-point answer focuses on the details of his post rather than his general point, and makes your answer both pedantic and accusatory. The way I read it, he only has a few main points:

1) Google+ makes it easy to unintentionally plagarize. Case in point, he wasn't able to easily get from a re-share to the original.

2) Google (the search engine) should NOT rank a Google+ post which is itself a clone of an actual article above the article itself. (Quote: 'But my query for "jon mitchell jury duty" didn't mean "Show me what my Friends+ are saying about 'jon mitchell jury duty.'" It meant "Show me Jon Mitchell's article about jury duty!"'.)

3) The Google+ web app is ugly.

4) Google (the company) is forcing you use your Google+ profile to identify yourself.

Summary) Google+ is a bad service.

You can disagree or agree with the above points, but simply quoting individual sentences doesn't lead to positive discussion.

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Point taken.

I think Jon's post was a troll post, with some personal opinions (which are totally valid), a few technical criticisms (totally valid), but mostly "user error" and "nothing new."

The internet makes it easy to unintentionally plagiarize, the internet makes it easy to intentionally plagiarize. Jon makes the valid point that linking is better on the internet than quoting with attribution. He makes the invalid point that plagiarism of any form is Google+'s fault.

Specific ranking is a matter of opinion. Really what Google (the search engine) has to go off of is people's behaviors. If people legitimately like Google+ posts more than anything else on the internet, how would you have them behave?

Google (the company) is forcing you to use your Google+ profile to identify yourself to people who use Google Search, and Google News. Facebook is forcing you to use your Facebook profile to identify yourself when you post on Facebook. Yahoo! is forcing you to use your Yahoo! ID to use Yahoo mail.

Summary) Google+ is as valuable to you as you choose to make it.

Jon's post was designed to attract attention, not to lead to positive discussion. I responded in kind.

"""I think Jon's post was a troll post, """

Is "troll" now a synonym for "he uses bad arguments"?

No. Troll means "Says things in order to rile people up, often to attract attention or amuse the troll". Bad arguments are one popular method of trolling.

Totally fair. Bloggers are professional trolls, but, as I think you've conceded (correct me if I'm wrong), I only trolled to get people in the door, and there are substantive arguments waiting when you get there.

I just want to point out that you absolutely can permalink to Disqus comments. The timestamp is the link, just like on Twitter.

I missed the fact that the timestamp is the link.

"Dad is ruining this family." That's a way to get people in the door, and there are substantive arguments waiting when you get there.

Isn't it a bit too negative, though? Dismissive? Whiny? Dishonest? Trollish?

There are people who want what's best for me, and there are people who attack me without reason. What are your feelings for Google+, Jon? As far as I can tell, you hate it, and you think it's ruining the internet.

"If people legitimately like Google+ posts more than anything else on the internet, how would you have them behave?"

So are you suggesting that might makes right or that if a site is popular it should be able to outrank the original content source just because it is popular?

Using this theory shouldn't Google check to see if Facebook has a similar post & rank that above the Google+ post whenever possible?

~~~

More seriously though, Google allows Google to create "relevancy" signals that are unique to certain pieces of content hosted on Google.com (or, at a minimum, over-represented among nepotistic sources), thus Google should aggressively discount that self-serving bias to error on the side of safety rather than setting up platforms that make it really easy to "accidentally" plagiarize content.

Obviously Google biz dev people realize the above self-serving bias & will do nothing to correct it, but it isn't a fact that should be ignored in public debate. At least not if we want to have an honest debate.

1) Hm. I usually just click on "Ripples", and I see the entire _chain_ of shares. All the way back to the first poster. We can debate the discoverability of that feature, but it's definitely there.

2) That, again, is debatable. It's certainly imaginable that the discussion about his article is more interesting to people than the actual article. It's true for this article, too - we're discussing it here, not over on his site.

3) There's no accounting for taste.

Going from there to "Google+ is a bad service" at least deserves a "for Jon Mitchell" qualifier. "is going to mess up the Internet" is pure link bait.

"Have fun flaming, +Friends" at the closing of an article makes it pretty clear he's not really interested in any discussion anyways.

Actually, I think Jon's postwas deliberately inflamatory and laden with hyperbole. This response is welcome as it goes through each issue raised one by one.

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