My invitation for you
The consumer version of Google+ will be discontinued in August 2019. All profiles, collections, and communities will be deleted by Google without any succeeding comparable service (as for now).
I moderated the largest Apple-related community on G+ with more than 900k members successfully keeping out spammers, trolls, and sickos even in the comment sections of posts. It was absolutely clean admittedly it needed really hard work.
Now I’m on MeWe after looking for an appropriate alternative.
Please join my group ‘Apple iThings’
https://mewe.com/join/apple-ithings
on MeWe.
Why MeWe?
MeWe feels like Google+. Lots of exciting improvements are announced for this year to let the expatriates feel well.
Thanks a lot.
Looking forward to meet you on MeWe.
From one centralized social network that can evaporate any moment at the whim of a company, to yet another one exactly like that? No thanks.
ReplyDeleteMasoud Abkenar what's the point of your comment? If you have a genuine reason why someone shouldn't use a specific social network then great, but your 'probably maybe' hate is childish.
ReplyDeleteMasoud Abkenar
ReplyDeleteI understand your consideration.
But then you should consequently stop all your Internet activities. I don’t care about privacy because hospitals, doctors, and banks already have the most sensitive data about me and I don’t know what they do with them. As I said I don’t care.
Thomas Unterstenhoefer You missed my point. My comment was not about privacy at all. I am genuinely worried that we join a new social network, but then the network disappears completely, wasting all the time we spend to migrate and build a new network on it. Heck, when Google couldn't keep their promise, why do you think MeWe can?
ReplyDeleteIf there were no sustainable other option, I could've agreed with you and joined MeWe on a temporary basis. Only temporary though, because, well MeWe is a temporary thing (take a look here to see why: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths). But there are decentralized networks which are feature-full enough (and death-proof) that I see no point in joining a centralized network yet another time.
Craig Barratt The point of my comment is that if Google (with the data-mining infrastructure that is second to none) could not keep a social network up, why do you think MeWe can? If you are in doubt, take a look at this page: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths
ReplyDeleteMy solution? Decentralized social networks. Have you heard of email? Have you heard when last time Email Inc. shut its services down? No you haven't, because there is no Email Inc., and that is why email exists for the last 50 years, and that is my point.
Masoud Abkenar
ReplyDeleteGood point. I hope you won’t faced with an unpleasant surprise. I feel quite well now with a new connection. Life’s boring without new challenges. I’ll lose lots of followers but that doesn’t matter to me. My new group on MeWe has some active members and talking with them is great. My rules for communities here and groups on MeWe are strict. A zero-tolerance policy keeps trolls and spammers out.
Craig Barratt Business / ownership continuity is a legitimate concern and consideration.
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody know the real reason why Google discontinues G+? I think, no. But this is an important question because other networks might be closed also.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius when presented as such maybe
ReplyDeleteThomas Unterstenhoefer Point of fact: Google have made no clear statements of which I'm aware of the disposition of the G+ site or data itself. Given that there will be a continuation of the G+ service as an enterprise product, it seems that the site itself may persist in a static format.
ReplyDeleteThat still requires a move, but it's less drastic than the situation you describe.
That's an open question and one I invite clarity from Google on. The bald statement in your post doesn't reflect this.
I'd prefer not spreading unverified or unfounded information here, and am requesting you edit the original post accordingly.
Thanks.
Edward Morbius Thanks for your reply. I’ll stay tuned.
ReplyDeleteI deleted two comments and here’s why:
ReplyDeleteHey guys, please do not use the comment section of my post to talk about alternate networks. I’ll delete them all. You may create your own post or comment on posts about pluspora or other networks. Thanks.
Thomas Unterstenhoefer Note that you're posting to a community and both you and mods have ability to delete comments. This can create confusion.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably better if you alert mods (I'm one) to issues. Or that you post to your own stream if you're going to moderate Community posts.
This is an unfortunate limitation of G+, and can (and has) created considerable problems in the past. Particularly as there's no indication of who's deleted what from whom. (Mods here are acting carefully to avoid tripping over one another.)
Thanks.
Edward Morbius I basically agree with you.
ReplyDeleteBut you should also accept the prerogative of a poster to delete off-topic comments. I’m not sure if mods always take their time to do so. So just see it as help not as acting against mods.
I myself moderated a 900k+ member community and followed the G+ TOS. The G+ team explicitly asks for the help of members to keep a community clean. That’s what I did here on my own post.
Thomas Unterstenhoefer And, likewise, you the requests of the mods.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to fight it out here and now. But it makes things more complicated. On platforms with moderator logs (o hai Reddit!) there's considerably less confusion over this.
(Reddit also disallows post authors generally from moderating discussions on their own posts, unless they are mods within the containing forum.)
Edward Morbius OK, this is the first time that I heard about a limitation of the rights of posters. But I will stop deleting comments even if they are from trolls, spammers, or sickos or if they are off-topic.
ReplyDeleteThomas Unterstenhoefer Ping the mods. We're around. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThomas Unterstenhoefer I suspect because it couldn't "win." G+ was started, effectively, as competition for F******k. G+ got its coterie of loyal followers (viz., all of us!), but it has never enjoyed comparable popularity. So I think Google decided to take its ball and end the game. Just my thoughts -- nothing official.
ReplyDeleteSteve Vasta Good point. Maybe you’re right. I myself still think that G+ wasn’t made for making money. This is definitely not what Alphabet likes. Yet another failed Google experiment. Unfinished, with the wrong people responsible for improving the product.
ReplyDeleteThomas Unterstenhoefer And you notice that the "improvements" made it worse, right? All of a sudden, the default setting for members' circles, photos, etc., was set to "private," unless said members changed them. That made it a lot harder to find interesting people!
ReplyDelete#SteveDisque
Steve Vasta Agree. I’m in doubt wether the G+ Team ever looked into the community ‘Google+ Help’. The Feedbacks you can find there are a giant (beta) testing program. Ignoring the results is kicking members in the ass. Well done Google.
ReplyDeleteOh, I suspect the members of the "improvement" team weren't users of the site, or not regular users.
ReplyDeleteThis sort of thing happens over and over when techies don't actually use the sites. Microsoft's refashioning of LinkedIn has made it progressively less flexible. And, in the late '00s, AOL - still a feasible company and product then - made the colossal mistake of buying the U.K,-based Bebo platform and transferring everyone's member profiles to it. The upshot? AOL sold Bebo within a year or two - Bebo itself has effectively been dead for some years now - and we all lost our profiles!
Steve Vasta
ReplyDeleteJust take it with Albert Einstein:
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
Steve Vasta To be fair, there were some improvements, buried in the noise, also factors not seen.
ReplyDeleteThe technical infrastructure has been rock solid. Collections and Search, both late adds, useful. Overall performance is good, especially relative to FB. Moderator and reporting/clean-up tools finally are at least partially useful. The Jan-Feb 2017 redesign actually fixed more than it broke. It didn't stem the user slide, but neither did it hurt it. In-content translation, useful.
Though I could come up with a longer list of blunders.
Steve Vasta AOL bought Bebo for $850 million. They sold it about 2 years later for less than $20m. It was bought back by the original owner for $1m. It's doing little if anything now. Interesting case study.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius
ReplyDelete‘Search is useful?’
Well, for a search giant like Google it was and still is a disaster.
• Try to search for a community member with characters you don’t have on your keyboard.
As a former moderator I regularly got headache.
• Search for content in a community on an Android driven device? Possible, but only with using a special syntax which is against everything we know about UI and UX.
• Support for moderators?
Well, the only feature they added was bulk moderation. But mods still don’t get any statistical information about members which posts arrive in the spam queue.
• A special feature to set more complex community rules?
You have to pin them and then there is no chance to pin high-quality content of members for a limited time without losing the rules.
• Recategorizing of posts?
Moderators have to do it for members in their limited leisure time.
• Orphaned communities?
Well, there is one I know, it’s “Mobile Devices” with more than 200k members who are not amused that one inactive moderator blocks everything because of an activated “Held for Review” option.
There’s a lot more.
Thomas Unterstenhoefer I don't contest that there emains ample room for improvement. Which by all appearances will never be attained.
ReplyDeleteBut I do challenge the statement that all the changes were negative. Many were, some painfully so.
But I give credit where due.