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Comment by mjfern | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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.

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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