Google Moderator is shutting down on June 30, 2015 | Hacker News Reader

Google Moderator is shutting down on June 30, 2015

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66 pointsdaw___40 comments

Moderator is relatively unheard of because it was created by one person as a 20% project, became popular internally, but less so externally. I ended up owning it for most of its life (it was a team of 3 people at one point)

Externally, we mainly used it for civics related stuff, though it saw some serious popularity in niche areas (like people using it to do youtube videos + questions), and was, in fact, in the accelerating growth phase when it was deprecated years ago, and we essentially cut off new external usage.

Because of how it was being used, despite being deprecated, it was kept running for many years to make sure people could find or build alternatives.

(Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my projects have had good shutdown plans :P)

Relatively unheard of is an understatement. I have been at Google for a few years and had no idea this was available externally.

Unless you were around between 2007 and 2010, you probably wouldn't :)

We also used it a decent amount externally when we did certain kinds of live Q&A Hangouts like developer platform office hours.

> Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my projects have had good shutdown plans

Ironically, I think there is a connection between the first part and the last part: Google usually has well-announced shutdowns with good shutdown plans with long migration-out periods, which results in Google shutdowns spending a lot of time in the public eye (when they are first announced, when various milestones hit, and as they are in their final period), which magnifies the attention around Google product shutdowns and the impression of their significance.

OTOH, its also one of the reasons I'm very comfortable using Google products -- any product can get shutdown if its not doing well enough (and a company that won't voluntarily shutdown products that aren't contributing will find itself shutting down along with its products), but at least Google usually does a good job of handling shut downs.

> and was, in fact, in the accelerating growth phase when it was deprecated years ago, and we essentially cut off new external usage.

Would you mind elaborating why it was shut down if it had accelerating usage? seems like a good reason to keep it going instead of shutting it down to the public...

I saw a glimpse of it only during a GDC video on YouTube. This is exactly what I need for giving lectures and talks. Infact, I have an architectural sketch and UI workflow notes for this exact application. Will it be open sourced?

It's not sanely possible to open source. All the interesting parts it depends on are in internal backend infrastructure. The UI is written in a really old version of GWT.

Also, Moderator actually started out as an early appengine app written in python, then was ported to normal Java.

If you want the algorithms, they are mostly already public.

Given the way UI/etc frameworks are today, it would take you about 1000x less time to write moderator again from scratch than it would to try to massage an open source version into working.

Thanks.

I was mostly interested for pedagogical reasons, not actual reuse. I'll probably just try to simulate a session with it myself if I can still signup, and record a screencast. Be my own test user for a UX experiment.

Moderator's code would probably scare you :) It was written in an era where optimization really matter. Not that it's written in assembler or anything, but it minimizes the amount of reads/writes it makes to the datastore through interesting means at times.

It is unlikely, for example, you would ever be able to discern the voting and question scheduling algorithms from reading the source code, despite the fact that i could write them for you in about 1-2 pages of java.

Great comment Danny, thanks for sharing. I have summarized the 3 main reasons why Google finally shut it down in a short post here: http://blog.sli.do/3-reasons-why-google-moderator-has-been-s...

I think mobile definitely played a key role, as the old UI didn't work there at all.

Google used this internally to manage questions at their all-hands meetings, letting the audience upvote good questions and avoid unimportant questions. Are there any other good solutions?

It's a real problem at conferences: many of the "questions" asked during the Q&A at public meetings are a waste of time, a chance to show off [1].

I found an example of Yik Yak used for this purpose [2]

[1] http://vooza.com/videos/conference-q-and-a/

[2] http://www.theconglomerate.org/2015/03/i-have-seen-the-futur...

Maybe something like Wisembly[1] ? I worked there as an intern a few years ago, and the product (and team) was great.

[1] http://wisembly.com/fr/

Google Moderator was built before the smartphone era and noone was really working on it since.

We have been solving many of the issues of Google Moderator with http://www.sli.do. Even some Google offices have been using sli.do at their events instead of the moderator.

How do you pronounce the name of your company?

"Google Moderator was built before the smartphone era and noone was really working on it since.'

This is not really accurate, though i guess it depends on what you consider the smartphone era.

Thanks for your great comments Danny. What I meant is that the moderator was not really optimized for mobile as it was built before smartphones became dominant.

It was still a solid product, that just became a bit "old" as technology progressed. As mentioned in several comments here, better alternatives (incl sli.do) are now available.

"What I meant is that the moderator was not really optimized for mobile as it was built before smartphones became dominant."

Actually, we had a new mobile UI built in ~2010, and tested it at various conferences and in various other products.

The truth was the product wasn't going to do well outside of some niches, because the large content providers wanted something they could either control, or that was just more popular even if it wasn't a good fit (IE CNN/et al wanted facebook/twitter for their on-air shows, and were okay with hiring full time people to do curation)

So, yeah, mobile didn't really kill moderator, despite your claims.

Interesting, didn't know that.

I just heard some of our clients that were using Moderator before that they switched because of the mobile UI. Was it ever available for public?

I have no clue what this is but I am shocked and appalled that Google would shut it down.

I give credit to Google for publicly announcing the shutdown and doing so in advance. (Unlike amazon that just rips products out of the site. Can't go there to find movie times anymore!)

Never heard of this before. For anybody else wondering, it seems to be a more structured version of the IAmA subreddit.

Same here.

Just wanted to chime in before everyone starts talking about how google never sticks with their products, this is relatively unknown and better alternatives exist. There is no reason to keep this service up.

I was frankly surprised to see it still up. I assumed it had shut down years ago.

It was launched in September 2008 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Moderator

The one person I saw using it, at least when it was relatively new, was Matt Cutts to organize the questions asked for the daily Google Webmasters videos. Though those seemed to have died out almost a year ago, and they had moved to the Product Forums by then anyway.

It was used for a US presidential election debate in 2008 and 2012. But other than influencing the course of human history it has enjoyed little traction.

Yes, what joy to witness such exquisite debate by those enlightened orators and masters of rhetoric. Truly something for the ages.

It was also used for the egyptian constitution :)

Really? haha. How cool, do you have any links?

Some of the blog posts have died. General details are linked from footnotes in http://www.yjil.org/docs/pub/39-1-comment-randolph-the-revol...

One of the moderator series is at: https://www.google.com/moderator/?hl=ar#15/e=581e0&t=581e0.4...

Note that moderator is not only available in a ton of languages, it can do auto-translation between all language pairs google translate supports.

I have seen it only once. It was used for Obama's election campaign and they reached me with Google moderator. As it usually is, they did not even care, am I American citizen or not. Default country, what can I say.

Funny story: When you saw it, it was scheduled for shutdown. They had an announcement all planned and were ready to start turning it down, and then they delayed it so that Obama could use it for his campaign.

What are some alternatives? I know https://www.sli.do/. Anything else?

The big one is Reddit AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA

https://www.mentimeter.com :)

Oh wow, Google shuts down another service that all of its competitors could not possibly have launched themselves.

Never used it or heard of it. It seems like a usefull tool though, so how come?

Now, let's save the precious data hosted on moderator.

Here's a list of services Google has shut down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discont...

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