Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

The penny drops at the author's conclusion:

"By updating its API to support posting, users of clients and plugins would start to actively publish to Google+. This would quickly increase the amount and quality of content available on this platform and in turn attract users and engagement."

No, it wouldn't. It would turn into Facebook, which right now is a stream of unreleated, unuseful junk. Why do I care if my friends on the other side of the state check into a bar? I don't. It's pointless, useless information.

What Facebook has built is a data dumping ground, songs listened to, bars checked into, and the always obnoxious comment from someone you know to someone you don't.

What G+ has tried to do, at least with games, is contextualize the notifications. If I'm playing a game, then I see the game notifications. They never appear in the main stream. I like this. I really hate the Spotify track notifications in Facebook, they're awful. I'm perfectly fine with seeing them in Spotify, because I've already made a decision to listen to music.

Facebook opened up the flood gates, and everyone is drowning. Google is taking the opposite approach, but everyone is thirsty. It seems a lot easier for Google to move towards more useful notifications than for Facebook to back away from them.

No, it wouldn't. It would turn into Facebook, which right now is a stream of unreleated, unuseful junk. Why do I care if my friends on the other side of the state check into a bar? I don't. It's pointless, useless information.

It's pointless and useless to you; you can hardly claim that it's pointless and useless to everyone. And this is exactly why I'll reiterate what I've said over and over again before... the solution is to give people better filters. You can't control what other people publish and trying to do so is pointless... but giving people filters to decide what to include/exclude in their streams it totally reasonable, and it's what Facebook, G+, and all the other "social" sites need to get better at.

Filters are not the panacea for this problem. I could filter by application, but that does not mean all input from an application are meaningless.

The automated stuff is what everyone wants to filter, but there are apps where that could be a mix e.g. I want to explicitly share a song from Spotify vs. having them automatically do it.

The only way this would work is to have a dedicated section for posts from APIs, but that really defeats the purpose for using the API in the first place.

Yeah, let's make things more complicated yaay! Filters, and more filters - now I have to remember exactly which one does what.

Stop thinking like an engineer and think like a non-technical common user.

Because all the non-technical common users have flooded into g+ and its uncluttered stream.

Don't quite follow the logic in your argument here. Correlation != Causation failure?

Stop thinking like an engineer and think like a non-technical common user.

Being a non-technical common user doesn't mean you don't need better filters; it means the service needs to make it easier for you to explain to it what you do and don't want to see. You don't even have to expose the word "filter" to the non-technical people, but the filters need to be there conceptually, nonetheless.

Note that I'm not saying this is easy... I'm saying this is the challenge that G+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. need to take on and solve. As opposed to the challenge of "how do we not let people post stuff." That's easy, and it's a cop-out.

You can try to make it easier (probably a UX challenge) but most people don't take the time to be meticulous with setting up their filters. e.g. Gmail filters, Twitter lists, etc.

In the case of Twitter, people actually might if the interface was better. People did, before the interface changed.

Now, adding a large group of people to a Twitter list via web Twitter is such a painful exercise, I often turn to an API solution (tweetbe.at in particular) to do it.

I think the real challenge for Google would be to make it easy for the user. I have no doubt they could build some awesome filtering logic in the back. But I'm not sure they could put a super easy, non-engineer style front on it. But I agree they should try. And who knows? maybe they are working on that and want to get it rock solid before they open the flood gate. Build the filters before everyone screams "we need filters"

I'm the author of the post. While I agree there is a risk of a flood of content, I have two counterpoints.

First, there are countermeasures. As a user on Google+ I'd quickly remove someone from my circles if they over-shared low quality content. Furthermore, Google+ can implement algorithms that affect the prominence of the content based on various quality factors. There's evidence that Facebook has such algorithms in place (1).

Second, the headwinds to gain share in a market with strong network effects outweighs the risk of a flood of content. Users already have a preference to use Facebook and Twitter given their network value (2). Any friction in sharing via Google+ just further encourages users to invest the bulk of their time and resources on these other platforms.

(1) http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32124/Facebook-C...

(2) http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/28/google-plus-ghost-town/

Second, the headwinds to gain share in a market with strong network effects outweighs the risk of a flood of content.

The evidence indicates otherwise. Both Google Buzz & FriendFeed failed in part because of lack of engaged users. That in turn was caused by the floods of autoposted crap.

There is no network effect benefit from content being posted from non-engaged users. Rather, it is the opposite: in the case of both Buzz & FriendFeed people would use it as an interface for reading Twitter (say) and the would move over to Twitter to converse. The crossposted content acted as a way to encourage people to leave the platform.

Engagement is king on social networks. Anything that reduces engagement should be discouraged.

The problem with removing people from circles, in the general case, not just super brain genius hacking rock stars, people get emotional and angry. You absolutely don't want that happening on a social platform competing with facebook.

Yea, it seems logical : X is being annoying on G+, I'll take him off it, but then X starts yelling at you IRL and drama follows and you start using G+ less which Google doesn't like.

Turning a "Ghost Town" into a town of robots is not any better.

I know of small communities that are actually flourishing inside Google+.

Google thinks that they rather have a small amount of original content rather that an abundance of auto-posts from other social networks.

Furthermore, Google+ can implement algorithms that affect the prominence of the content based on various quality factors. There's evidence that Facebook has such algorithms in place (1)

...which don't work in most cases that I've seen.

Second, the headwinds to gain share in a market with strong network effects outweighs the risk of a flood of content.

You're assuming that gaining share is more important than creating quality content. This is not an assumption shared by Vic Gundrota, nor I.

Honestly, and I don't mean to be rude, you sound a bit too much like some marketing wonk that someone who actually cares about the product. As many users at whatever the cost to the product quality is just not a winning long-term strategy, and Google always plays long-term.

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