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Bye-bye, Google+ — but what next?
Google+ is sliding downhill. A couple years ago my posts would garner comments from lots of smart people, leading to long and deep discussions. These days only a few stalwarts remain — a skeleton crew. I've copied most of my posts here to my website and blog. I mainly post here out of inertia: for certain purposes, I haven't found anything better yet.
As for the reasons, I agree with +Gideon Rosenblatt's analysis. Also read the many comments on his post! But the more important question is: what to do now?
Instead of whining about our masters, we should be our own masters — and unleash our creative energies! A bottom-up approach, run by all of us, could be better than top-down corporate control. A diverse, flexible federation could be better than a single unified platform.
Has anyone here tried Mastodon yet?
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance and participate in the social network seamlessly.
You can check it out here:
https://mastodon.social/about
Google+ is sliding downhill. A couple years ago my posts would garner comments from lots of smart people, leading to long and deep discussions. These days only a few stalwarts remain — a skeleton crew. I've copied most of my posts here to my website and blog. I mainly post here out of inertia: for certain purposes, I haven't found anything better yet.
As for the reasons, I agree with +Gideon Rosenblatt's analysis. Also read the many comments on his post! But the more important question is: what to do now?
Instead of whining about our masters, we should be our own masters — and unleash our creative energies! A bottom-up approach, run by all of us, could be better than top-down corporate control. A diverse, flexible federation could be better than a single unified platform.
Has anyone here tried Mastodon yet?
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance and participate in the social network seamlessly.
You can check it out here:
https://mastodon.social/about
Losing My Patience with Google+
Over the last six months or so I have watched as the quality of engagement here on Google+ has steadily declined. I have watched my follower count fluctuate and flatline. I have watched as people I used to engage with quite a bit here have left or dramatically scaled back their investments of time here. And yes, I have seen my own enthusiasm for investing time here wane significantly.
I ask myself why and the answers are never as simple as I would like. In the end though, I have come to the sad conclusion that the real thing that is killing Google+ is just plain bad management.
Lack of Attention
One gets the real sense that many of the people now charged with running Google+ don't really understand what it was that once made this service so good in its early days. Indeed, one gets the sense that few of the people managing the service today even really use Google+. There are a few noteworthy exceptions like +Yonatan Zunger and +Leo Deegan, of course. I once made a circle with some 50+ Googlers who were once active here, and when I click on that stream, well, it feels a lot like a ghost town.
+Bradley Horowitz, the VP in charge of Streams, Photos and Sharing, (which is where Google+ sits within the Google org structure) hasn't posted here on Google+ in half a year.
Oh, and remember +Luke Wroblewski, who used to manage Google+ and would send out all those updates on the redesign? Well, he hasn't posted a single thing here in over 7 weeks (even though @lukew is quite active on Twitter). You know why? I just happened to check his LinkedIn profile, and he's apparently no longer managing Google+. I don't recall seeing any announcement of this change - just a sudden silence from the man perhaps most responsible for the UI makeover of Google+.
Rudderless and Un-resourced
That decision to remake the Google+ UI followed a long string of decisions going back to the separation of Photos and Hangouts, each of which have seriously hurt the service. I know there were probably some good reasons to move to the new, mobile-dominant (as opposed to "mobile-friendly") UI, but the lack of enduser empathy from deprecating all the old functionality really was pretty staggering. Much of it hasn't come back, and much of what has is so stripped down (e.g. Events, community moderation) that it isn't really that usable.
As users, we have been asked to be patient and to have faith in the new strategy. Because I have been such a huge fan of Google+ for so long, that is exactly what I have done. I've been patient. I've believed. Believed that some big, cool fix was coming down the pike that would not only fix all the problems caused by the UI decision, but actually start innovating again with some cool new functionality.
Yes, we got Collections, and they actually are quite useful even if they do need a lot of work still. But that's really about it. It's been a couple years now and the silence is stultifying.
And finally, it hit me:
Maybe this is it. Maybe Google has significantly curtailed its investments in this network. Maybe the management squandered the scarce resources it did have on a redesign that users weren't really even asking for. And maybe, just maybe, what we see right now is pretty much what we're going to get.
User Investments
And this is where I start to get really mad. Like many others here, I have invested a lot of personal time and energy building a following here. Like many of you, I have poured heart and soul into filling this place not just with great content, but also with a sense of community. I could have made those investments in Twitter or Facebook or reddit, but like many of you, I made them here. And now I'm starting to wonder how smart of a decision that was.
All of this is particularly raw right now because I'm starting to play around a bit with the new distributed social network called Mastodon (https://mastodon.technology/@gideonro). It's far from perfect, but one thing that is very different is that it is open source and federated, rather than centrally owned and controlled.
There are lots of implications to this different model. For one, there is lots of competition and innovation in the works because Mastodon sits on top of GNU Social and rests within a "Fediverse" of related, and interoperable, social network platforms. They are working on solutions that make it easy to export your content from one platform to another - to prevent lock-in. Also, there is a lot of visibility on exactly what investments are being made in the platform by various contributors.
More importantly though, there is a very conscious understanding that the value of these networks is only partially the result of the software developers behind these solutions. Just as much of it lies with the end users.
In the end, this is the thing that I am most frustrated about right now with Google+. End users have made this place every bit as much as the coders and product planners behind Google+. This isn't to in any way diminish the importance of those contributions. But what I do find frustrating is the way that Google seems to regularly dismiss the importance, and the real economic and social value, of end user contributions. This was true with Google Reader, and sadly it appears to be true with Google+.
I'm still rooting for Google+ to turn things around, of course. I have a huge soft spot for this place, given all the great learning I've done here with my fellow travelers. But one thing is clear: I'm losing my patience, and I don't think I'm alone.
Over the last six months or so I have watched as the quality of engagement here on Google+ has steadily declined. I have watched my follower count fluctuate and flatline. I have watched as people I used to engage with quite a bit here have left or dramatically scaled back their investments of time here. And yes, I have seen my own enthusiasm for investing time here wane significantly.
I ask myself why and the answers are never as simple as I would like. In the end though, I have come to the sad conclusion that the real thing that is killing Google+ is just plain bad management.
Lack of Attention
One gets the real sense that many of the people now charged with running Google+ don't really understand what it was that once made this service so good in its early days. Indeed, one gets the sense that few of the people managing the service today even really use Google+. There are a few noteworthy exceptions like +Yonatan Zunger and +Leo Deegan, of course. I once made a circle with some 50+ Googlers who were once active here, and when I click on that stream, well, it feels a lot like a ghost town.
+Bradley Horowitz, the VP in charge of Streams, Photos and Sharing, (which is where Google+ sits within the Google org structure) hasn't posted here on Google+ in half a year.
Oh, and remember +Luke Wroblewski, who used to manage Google+ and would send out all those updates on the redesign? Well, he hasn't posted a single thing here in over 7 weeks (even though @lukew is quite active on Twitter). You know why? I just happened to check his LinkedIn profile, and he's apparently no longer managing Google+. I don't recall seeing any announcement of this change - just a sudden silence from the man perhaps most responsible for the UI makeover of Google+.
Rudderless and Un-resourced
That decision to remake the Google+ UI followed a long string of decisions going back to the separation of Photos and Hangouts, each of which have seriously hurt the service. I know there were probably some good reasons to move to the new, mobile-dominant (as opposed to "mobile-friendly") UI, but the lack of enduser empathy from deprecating all the old functionality really was pretty staggering. Much of it hasn't come back, and much of what has is so stripped down (e.g. Events, community moderation) that it isn't really that usable.
As users, we have been asked to be patient and to have faith in the new strategy. Because I have been such a huge fan of Google+ for so long, that is exactly what I have done. I've been patient. I've believed. Believed that some big, cool fix was coming down the pike that would not only fix all the problems caused by the UI decision, but actually start innovating again with some cool new functionality.
Yes, we got Collections, and they actually are quite useful even if they do need a lot of work still. But that's really about it. It's been a couple years now and the silence is stultifying.
And finally, it hit me:
Maybe this is it. Maybe Google has significantly curtailed its investments in this network. Maybe the management squandered the scarce resources it did have on a redesign that users weren't really even asking for. And maybe, just maybe, what we see right now is pretty much what we're going to get.
User Investments
And this is where I start to get really mad. Like many others here, I have invested a lot of personal time and energy building a following here. Like many of you, I have poured heart and soul into filling this place not just with great content, but also with a sense of community. I could have made those investments in Twitter or Facebook or reddit, but like many of you, I made them here. And now I'm starting to wonder how smart of a decision that was.
All of this is particularly raw right now because I'm starting to play around a bit with the new distributed social network called Mastodon (https://mastodon.technology/@gideonro). It's far from perfect, but one thing that is very different is that it is open source and federated, rather than centrally owned and controlled.
There are lots of implications to this different model. For one, there is lots of competition and innovation in the works because Mastodon sits on top of GNU Social and rests within a "Fediverse" of related, and interoperable, social network platforms. They are working on solutions that make it easy to export your content from one platform to another - to prevent lock-in. Also, there is a lot of visibility on exactly what investments are being made in the platform by various contributors.
More importantly though, there is a very conscious understanding that the value of these networks is only partially the result of the software developers behind these solutions. Just as much of it lies with the end users.
In the end, this is the thing that I am most frustrated about right now with Google+. End users have made this place every bit as much as the coders and product planners behind Google+. This isn't to in any way diminish the importance of those contributions. But what I do find frustrating is the way that Google seems to regularly dismiss the importance, and the real economic and social value, of end user contributions. This was true with Google Reader, and sadly it appears to be true with Google+.
I'm still rooting for Google+ to turn things around, of course. I have a huge soft spot for this place, given all the great learning I've done here with my fellow travelers. But one thing is clear: I'm losing my patience, and I don't think I'm alone.
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The frustrating thing about Facebook is that you can't justify spending time producing quality content because it is transitory, it isn't deleted or purged, but it scrolls off of timelines and it is difficult for you to find your own past posts, much less anyone else's. It's search facility is poor even for your own posts. Any public posts which aren't current, effectively get siloed. Google+ search did not have to be very good to be far superior, however, google+ search is disappointingly bad at finding comments you have made on other posts in the past. My expectations were higher given that there is little excuse for google to be bad at it. Comments appear to be disrespected on google+ search. Perhaps that is the reason the numbers of people who actually invest time in producing substantive comments has declined.May 3, 2017
+John Baez I have been meaning to write a short note to you concerning the whole "fiddling while Rome burns" thing (or "polishing the brass on the Titanic," to quote Fight Club).
I totally agree that it's good and necessary to engage in activism with respect to real-world issues. But I think not giving yourself permission to enjoy life and post/discuss/spend time on things you find interesting may be going too far.
My feeling is that this can be counterproductive in the long run, leading to a grim, jaded outlook; in turn that may end up sapping your energy even for things you're doing that matter more in the here and now. I apologize for the unsolicited pep talk ;)May 4, 2017
+Vlad Levin - thanks for the pep talk! There's truth in what you say.
Luckily I engage in a broader range of activities than are visible on G+, so even if I only post tirades against Trump here, I still spend time enjoying life: talking about cool math, reading about Roman history, watching hummingbirds sip from the fountain in my back yard, etc. This is often better than spending time on social media.
Nonetheless it's true that I've been feeling grim and jaded lately. Part of it is Brexit, the rise of Trump, etc. But there's more. My mother died, and I've been spending a lot of time working with lawyers on her estate. On top of that, I've been heading a committee to choose 8 visiting assistant professors from about 120 candidates. Thanks to bureaucratic demands for fairness - which in general sound like a good thing - this requires a lot of repetitive work: going through 120 files and doing the same thing for each one. It makes me remember how much I hate repetitive mental labor... usually I only do it when I grade final exams. Repetitive physical labor is less soul-destroying, because I can think about math while doing it.
Luckily that hiring process is winding to its conclusion, and I'm now out of the US, exploring Hong Kong. I also got up the energy to write a fun post about diamondoids. I really do enjoy telling lots of people about cool stuff.May 4, 2017
I'm so sorry to hear about your mother. It was an honor to get to check on her welfare after the derecho. She was very gracious at the appearance of a strange woman and two little girls on her doorstep.
Hang in there. As my daughter says, "Self-care is an act of resistance in Late Capitalism."May 4, 2017- +Jenny Meyer - I was planning to announce her demise more formally at some point. There's a bit more of a story to it.
She was impressed by your visit... thanks yet again!May 4, 2017 - +John Baez I'm glad you're still enjoying life in the real world :) I agree that social media (and a lot of computer use in general) is probably not the best way to spend one's time! I'm jealous of the humming birds! I live in Canada but my Aunt lives in Los Angeles and she has lemon trees and a humming bird feeder in her backyard. Sigh!
I'm sorry to hear about your mom. Hopefully at least the estate stuff will be done with sooner rather than later. I can understand how dealing with that would be both physically and emotionally exhausting. I'm glad the grind of the professor hiring is going away!
Enjoy Hong Kong! I'd love to visit there some day and eat delicious dim sum every day :)May 4, 2017 - Thanks, +Vlad Levin.
Yes, I've been thinking about how people get "ground down" and lose their inner vitality. Now I'm trying to restore my inner vitality with a daily regimen of dim sum.
Hummingbirds are amazing because they seem to use so much energy to stay aloft, and they survive just by sipping nectar. It seems improbable. And then you read how some of them migrate thousands of kilometers every year....May 5, 2017
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