Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

So what do you actually need to do to accomplish this? I followed the link to the Google+ page and it's just a giant wall of confusion.

I see a circle with a link in the middle saying "Add Circle". Is that what I want to do? I would have expected to see something along the lines of "Add me to this Circle" so that I'd be part of it.

Anyway, I clicked the "Add Circle" link, and got a string of progressively less parseable pages full of people's pictures that I can presumably drag and drop places. I just makes no sense whatsoever.

So first point: Google+ seems to have a terrible interface.

Second point: Assuming that somebody here (the author at least) must have interacted with that page in a way that created some form of value to his life. What are the steps to do so?

View on HN

Go to https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts and, in one of the "Hacker News has shared a circle with you" posts, click the blue "View shared circle" button. Name the circle and voila, you now have a circle in your Google+ account with all the HN people who signed up on http://hngp.axxim.net/

Edit: I forgot to warn you that several hundred people will add you to their circles, and you will get notifications when that happens. You should probably go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and preemptively disable those notifications before you are drowning in them.

That's all you need to do to get the results mentioned in the article, but you might get a lot of unwanted noise in your Google+ stream from this circle. If that's a problem for you, go to your Google+ "home" page https://plus.google.com/stream and find your new HN circle in the left-hand column. When you click it, you get a stream made from that circle, and you can change the "volume" of the circle using the slider that appears in the upper-right. Now when you browse your normal stream you won't get noise from the HN circle.

"You've reached the daily limit for adding to your circles. You can add more tomorrow."

For some reason it doesn't let me add anything by using that button. I can manually select each one and add them using the popup :)

Silly error... I don't (currently) use G+ on a daily basis, so this error message is a bit facile - I haven't even touched G+ today, so either the HN shared circle is too big, or it's reached it's own daily limit.

Edit: apparently the limit is 1000, so just add the shared circle from a posting that has < 1000 entries (like this one: https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts/DaWro5Hp... )

It's fixed now. They splitted the main circle in circles with 999 people each.

Thanks, that works great.

Doh. And now I have a whole bunch of people showing up in my chat client. Is there a way to disable that? I see the options for 'Who can start a Messenger conversation with you?' but they are somewhat limited and that's not the option I'm quite looking for.

Yes! Leave it to Google to screw up privacy, I don't use G+ much but this right here has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I would say it's intentionally convoluted to get people to have poorly set settings (more "sharing"), but let's face it, Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design (they're engineers!).

Anyway, I spent 20 minutes frantically trying to figure out how to handle gChat privacy settings while my carefully curated buddy list filled up with random names.

- Go to plus.google.com

- Find the chat box on the left side, there is a small down arrow at the top left of it

- Click on privacy settings

- MAKE SURE that only the circles you want in gChat are selected (IE uncheck the hacker news circle you made)

DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN!

I'm still trying to figure out how to get the names off my list, even though that has been set. No new names though. I'm just surprised that Google would add to my Google Chat buddy list, a totally separate product, without ever asking me if i wanted to combine G+ and gChat like that.

Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??

>DO THIS BEFORE YOU JOIN!

From my experience, you can do this even after you join.

Yep, it took me all of three seconds to reverse this setting (admittedly, when I had been told where to look).

I connect to gchat using a third party program, and my contact list in this program is still full of unwanted contacts that I have to manually delete.

I said do it before you join to save people in a similar situation.

Google's hilarious UI's come from their aversion to design

This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult.

Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??

Why is this scary, other than the fact that it's different from what's happened in the past? Was the Chat / Mail integration scary too?

You're hinting at Google's design problem in your comment.

Good design isn't primarily about UI research and one way mirrors. It's having a design vision for what you want to be, and how you communicate that to your users. Simplicity and ease of use are important factors too.

As this thread points out Google utterly fails at this. The top comment is "I have no idea how this thing works"

Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX.

They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles to chat, but making it automatic seems silly.

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to.

Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.)

(Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)

> I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

Google+ is a social network. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it can be successful by forcing users to use it in a specific way. If the people using the service want to leverage the service in a certain way, there doesn't seem to be anything "wrong" with that. In fact, I'd argue that Google should take such usage as feedback into improving the service to better incorporate the new usage patterns.

EDIT: This perhaps should go as it's own comment, but I'm going to throw it here for the time being:

People like to use social networks as a public publishing platform as well as a way to share with friends. This is to some extent supported by Google, as they have encouraged people to use G+ as a blogging platform. The behavior we see with the HN circle is (I'd argue) just people attempting to hack functionality onto public side of G+, which IMHO is a part of G+ that is sorely lacking.

I guess the problem is that you added a bunch of strangers to Google+. That's not what Google+ is for.

Um... Isn't that the reason "circles" in Google+ exist? To draw lines?

It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.

I don't think anyone only "reads" one community. According to interest, one participates in many?

Personally, I found all this quite confusing (and just when I figured how to "circle"; doh, limit has been reached for adding people. But, you can start adding tomorrow!)... and following the advice of sp332 and betterth, I avoided falling into blunders like Google adding all 1000+ contacts to my Gtalk or notifying each and everything that ever happens in G+ universe.

Moreover, since now people are split inside circles, am I supposed to update the circle manually everyday?

Agreed, what should be a simple thing has turned into a usability nightmare. Why is Google limited the number of people I can add? Why is there a hard cap of 5000 profiles that I can add total?

If this is supposed to be a social network, why are these limitations in place?

I've had this debate a number of times, but in the end it's very evident that Google is an engineering company that hires designers (and not a design company that hires engineers). I don't think that they took design seriously at all until more recently and there hasn't been any lack of posts on HN or elsewhere talking about the growth of good web design. In short, their design has improved from 2010 and beyond due to a large push by management for updated and unified design across products, and I'd argue Matias Duarte's position on the Android team.

As for the chat/mail integration, I didn't like it either. It filled my gchat with hundreds of useless contacts from gmail.

That's another great point: Did they not even test these features, not even once? The gmail/chat integration sucked, and it filled my gchat buddy list of a number of users I'd emailed -once- in my life without ever asking me if I wanted to suddenly be chat-buddies with them, sharing my away/idle/etc information, etc.

I'm sorry but Google has always sucked at privacy and I find it funny that you use something as poor as the chat/mail integration as an example.

Then, please explain, why is it so bad? What is the weak link in the chain? I just decided against joining the HN circle because the list of instructions to do it was too much like the instructions for editing linux config files, which I only follow out of necessity.

Their design isn't up to snuff, I'd agree. So, it appears all that research and the brain trust nets a let down.

Please be gentle

This is kind of a dealbreaker here. Especially since the chat in Google+ is indeed set to not show the Hacker News circle, but my chat in gmail is still showing everybody! And there's no visible setting to change that outside of Google+

The setting is unfortunately hidden. You need to click on the little arrow that's next to the chat login next to stream to find it. If you're not signed into chat first do so then click the little arrow again. From there you can add and remove circles from your chat.

Thank you for finding that! If you go to the chat settings on the Gmail page (where I usually use chat), this option doesn't exist.

Thank you!! I've been searching for this inside Gmail and was very confused. I never thought of looking for it inside Plus

Edit: I spoke to soon. This controls who appears in the Chat inside Plus, but the chat inside GMail still shows everybody!

You can add yourself to the Hacker News Circle at http://hngp.axxim.net/.

The "Hacker News Circle" Google+ re-shares an updated circle every 5 minutes. Clicking "Add Circle" allows you to copy that circle into one of your own.

I just made a straight copy called "Hacker News" in my circles where I dump the shared circle.

All this is implementing a feature that Google+ desperately needs: a public circle that users can subscribe to rather than copy into their private circles, like Twitter's lists.

(Note: I am not the creator of the Hacker News Circle, just a user)

Same exact experience here. Should I add the Hacker News circle to my friends circle? Acquaintances circle? Family circle?

At this point I can hear some Googler with a 160 IQ chiming in that, algorithmically, it doesn't matter whether Hacker News is a person or a group of people; the effect on personal search is the same. This misses the point. People think in metaphors, and if the metaphor is broken they assume the product is too.

With so many brilliant people at Google, and Facebook nipping at their heels, I am shocked at how bad G+ remains months after it launched.

The Hacker News Circle is a Google+ page that publishes the shared "Hacker Circle."

The Hacker Circle is a circle that has been shared publicly. This means you can look at the list of people in the circle, add any that look interesting, or, as I did, add the entire circle as one of my own personal circles.

But like the posts say, your own circle can't be updated by someone else. The page will periodically release an updated version of the circle, and if you want all the latest people, you need to go back to the page and re-add the circle.

To add yourself, visit the link as instructed in the posts.

As far as I can tell, when I do a search, social results should automatically show up. I must not have this feature turned on yet, or maybe I need to turn it on and can't figure out how.

I might be wrong on something, I don't even use G+ much, it's just how it seems to me on a few minutes of looking at it.

I made an HN specific circle so that it could easily be limited or turned off. Getting a flood of messages from several hundred people can be a bit annoying.

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