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Comment by spacemanmatt | Hacker News Reader

Whereas Facebook is an altruistic service run by the users for the users.

Oh, spare me the breathless reporting on Skynet, please.

Facebook has an opt-in mechanism called "signing up for a Facebook account." G+'s equivalent is "signing up for an unrelated service, possibly as long as a decade ago."

I declined G+ for a while, but eventually pressed a button and consented to convert my accounts. I am not aware of any automatic conversion, especially from 10-year-old accounts. I assure you, my Gmail account is older than that.

Gmail entered private beta on April 1, 2004.

Either it stops being optional after some point, or they tricked me into converting vis-a-vis some Dark Pattern (which is if anything even more scummy as far as I'm concerned). My YouTube account is separate from my Gmail account and I can assure you that I never would have added a g+ page to it on purpose given the choice.

How do I use Facebook Chat and Facebook Photos without a Facebook News Feed account, and without Facebook Like buttons recording every web page I visit?

I think the disconnect here is that people don't seem to get that "I voluntarily signed up for a social network" is an important step for a lot of people. It's entirely possible that a lot of people who hate g+ now wouldn't have minded it if it came out of the ether right after Facebook got popular, instead of being retrofitted onto something that already existed and foisted on that userbase above its protests. You can't just unilaterally change the purpose of your site and expect people who liked the old site to automatically like the new one.

FWIW, I also hate Facebook Connect and refuse to use it on principle despite having a Facebook account I voluntarily use.

Facebook as a product does actually behave in a far less user hostile fashion. It's relatively fast and just makes much more sense. I do understand that FB actually are weasels but G+ feels like it was made by weasels.

For all the fuss FB has an enormously superior signal-to-noise ratio than G+. My default G+ page is a horrifying mess of things I have zero interest in.

The Google "but you trust FB with this data" line is tiresome. People trust FB because they're an understood silo. Google showing up in unexpected places is why they're regarded as creepy.

I don't see that suggested anywhere in the article. But maybe I just missed it. Can you please point out where that claim is made?

I was being absolutely sarcastic about Facebook being run by and for the users. G+ and Facebook are both artifacts of their respective owners' lead generation businesses.

Right. That's pretty widely understood at this point. Were you just repeating what's already known, or was there some insightful point that you were trying to make?

Parent was explaining how this news story is reporting what's already known, and has no insightful point.

It wasn't a very good way of expressing that idea, if so. It makes it appear that the article claims something that it does not, without actually conveying the ideas that it was supposedly intended to.

If it's an insight that people have with the wrong expectations are disappointed for the right reasons, then you're welcome.

(reply nesting level reached)

You don't need a facebook account to do other non-facebook things. You do with Google plus.

You don't need a G+ or any kind of Google account to do other non-Google things, say shop at Amazon or watch a Netflix video. This is the right way to compare. The major difference is that we're not a one-trick pony, we have dozens of services that people want. For a more comparable example, several mostly-unrelated Microsoft online products (Office365, SkyDrive, Xbox, Skype, Outlook.com, etc.) are all under the umbrella of a Microsoft Account. Which also makes a lot of sense, for example I suppose you can buy a unified cloud storage quota that can be used by both Office365 and SkyDrive, among other things. OTOH, because I have a MS account, I also have a (send-only at least) Outlook.com account. But I have no problem with that, I just don't use it.

Certainly. But one difference with e.g. Skydrive is that everytime I upload a photo to what used to be Picasa (now Google+ Photos), it offers to share on Google+ and I have to skip that step.

You don't. You can just downgrade and delete your G+ Profile.

You can very well disable your Google+ Profile and keep any other services. The only extra work needed is in case you have a Youtube channel. In this case you just have to unlink your Youtube and Google+ Accounts first.

https://plus.google.com/downgrade/

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