Remember circle sharing?
That was the thing that absolutely made my G+ experience. To have one's stream kick-started by a great big ball of exciting and interesting contacts.
Is that possible in any of the alternatives?
That was the thing that absolutely made my G+ experience. To have one's stream kick-started by a great big ball of exciting and interesting contacts.
Is that possible in any of the alternatives?
The same experience was massively true for me. Someone was sharing circles of folks interested in science, and I used that. It was an immediate hit -- and not just of the specific science they were doing (what we'd find in a community these days) but of the other things they were trying to publicize via public postings.
ReplyDeleteI am trying MeWe. https://mewe.com/i/nethar.6
ReplyDeleteIt has a function that is similar to circle sharing if not quite the same.
mewe.com - MeWe: The best chat & group app with privacy you trust.
Anyone remember ripples?
ReplyDeleteFoster Cat How tho? MeWe doesn't even allow me to categorize contacts, unless I am mistaken.
ReplyDeleteAndreas Geisler create a new group, add the contacts you want to share with, then share with that group. You can also set up how they can interact with your posts in that circle/group. Something you cannot do in G+.
ReplyDeleteThat's sharing content with members of a group, Eric Bright.
ReplyDeleteCircle sharing was a way to tell others which people you interact with. You could, for example, share all members of your own "likes cheeseburgers" circle to someone else, and they could then immediately add them all or partially to their circles.
Oh, sharing of Circles, not to them.
ReplyDeleteNot offhand, though Diaspora's "Aspects" were the germ of Google+'s Circles, and I think through data export and some munging about, you should be able to distribute lists of people (but not as a pre-defined circle) worth following.
For myself, I found Circle shares of limited use -- they tended to be hyuuuuuuge and really, really noisy.
Instead: find someone saying interesting things with an interesting crowd, and start following the people within that set who strike you as the most interesting and good at hosting conversations.
Just because someone comments well doesn't mean they can (or do) create posts with good conversations, and vice versa.
I tend to think of "hosts" and "salons" (in human, not computer senses). If you want to go to good parties (salons), find someone who's good at hosting them.
Yonatan Zunger truly got and exemplified this here at G+.
Hashtag search on Diaspora is also useful.
There were many who hated circles - can't recall why. I found them useful when I first joined and didn't know anyone. I had one friend who introduced me to circles and things took off for me, so I didn't hate them..
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius I hate the fact that hashtags are so open to abuse, though. Aspect sharing would be super-awesome, especially since right now nobody really has an audience.
ReplyDeleteMartha Magenta circles had a couple of problems. Two I hated to content with was the limited size without knowing what that limits is. Once a circle got to big not everyone who was in that circle might have been notified that something was shared to them.
ReplyDeleteAnother was that if other people added me to their small high priority circles I had no control over wether or not I wanted to be notified everytime they shared something with that circle.
Small anoyances in the big picture but people still complained a lot
The really good thing about circles is that you could use them like tags. So a person/contact/page could be in multiple circes simultaneously.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius I see what you mean about Salons.
ReplyDeleteNow I want to make and share an aspect named "Salons to be seen at".
Aaaaugh!
Also, agree about Yonatan Zunger's Salons. After sharing of circles was taken out, his posts were one of the main sources of excellent new people to impose on.
Nethar6 some people thought circles spammy. In the early days they were centered around common interests, but later, it was anything-goes and a bit spammy
ReplyDeleteNethar6 It took G+ years to work out most of the Notification annoyances, and they still left too many in. I really do not care about +1s of posts or comments, and yet I'm flooded with them with no way to filter or block. Ello, Mastodon, and Diaspora each solve this, in slightly different (but effective) ways.
ReplyDeleteI liked Circles at first. I have to say I really only started to understand circle sharing right when they removed that feature.
ReplyDeleteI've always felt that Circles and Collections would both benefit enormously from being combined. I liked that Circles were about people, not topics, but Collections were much easier to understand. It was nice being able to restrict your stream to specific Circles, but this could give an odd mix since few people post on a single topic. Far better, in some ways, to be able to organise your stream by subject than person (this is what I do with Feedly, which works well).
That said, Circles made it possible to discover people who you'd broadly agree with on at least some topics but whose interests were not identical. I felt this was a good way to reduce filter bubbles and I wish it had been developed further.
Martha Magenta The biggest initial problem with Circles was the "you're holding it wrong" arguments. Somewhere back in the depths of time was a thread with someone accusing another Plusser of using Circles wrong ... because the person they were yelling at wasn't posting the type of content that the yeller thought they should be posting...
ReplyDeleteCircles confounded distribution and classification. As has almost every G+ distribution mechanism.
What I suggested way back when was a way to define topic, distribution scope, and public visibility.
With topic you defined what a post was about. Nuclear Fusion. Catnip. My Cousin Vinny. 1917 RomComs. Whatever.
With distribution you defined who was notified about a post. This is roughly G+'s Circles. "All circles" and "Global" would be two meta-classifications.
With public, you could specify whether or not a post was publicly accessible. A public post could be targeted to a distribution, meaning that only those people would be notified or get a Stream view, but in addition, search or direct URL access could access the content, and it would be available directly from your profile page.
On the reading side, you could specify intersections of sources (the inverse of distributions) and topics that you were interested in at a given time. There are some topics I really only want to hear about from people who know what they're talking about (getting around the tag abuse problem Andreas Geisler mentioned), others I'm willing to sample from everyone.
G+ search would also get contaminated by keyword stuffing. I remember searching for a printer issue on G+ (there were some useful posts) and having to block a half-dozen spam profiles which were dominating the results. Once those were out of the way, the results were useful. Though as an alternative, being able to say "eliminate this profile from this search, for right now" would be another approach.
How much of this is too complex for a 3-billion-user (or even 100 million occasional-user) public, I don't know, but I think that was one of Google's concerns.
A related point : I've never been happy with (of all things !) G+'s search facilities. There are options to filter posts in reasonably sophisticated ways with the correct syntax, but this is hardly intuitive. It needs a GUI, drop-down boxes, that sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteFinding new and interesting people to follow has always been a bit haphazard. Randomness has some advantages, but it would be useful to take some control over this. For example, being able to search for people by their profession, hobbies, favourite colour, whatever. Or seeing their most highly plussed post or comment in a particular topic. Stuff that would give you a reasonable way to asses a person at a glance and quickly find people you might want to interact with.
Rhys Taylor Discovery ... is expensive.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor that is the advantage of communities, e.g. you are a coder or a poet and want to find and share info and skills with others, then set up a community which is searchable, then people will join you.
ReplyDeleteNothing is like gplus
ReplyDeleteI like the usage of hashtags for discovery rather than Communities. Communities split apart my posts into isolated silos. Anyone searching for content in Communities has to deal with the fact that no one is even able to crosspost to multiple related Communities (in a practical sense).
ReplyDeleteBut with hashtags, you can quickly and easily search for and keep track of the topics you're interested in.
In any case, I've had pluspora users who had not previously been following me on G+ add me, I think. I think most of it has been via seeing my comments in discussion comments, but I've added new people according to hashtag searches on some common interests.
Circle sharing was, at best, a blunt instrument.
I too got a lot of value out of Circle sharing early on, being part of Frasier Cain's widely shared Science Circle due to my work on arXiv reviews. However, it was a brittle system that required trust to prevent littering with junk "members".
In contrast, a simple hashtag search for #science immediately provides actual posted content of people actively posting stuff with the #science hashtag (in pluspora). I think that's more useful, even if you can't just add people en masse.
Isaac Kuo But #science in general means something different than in a comedy group, or then in a dating relationships group. :-(
ReplyDeleteI do think the ability to put one post in multiple collections (or even multiple communities) was a big shortcoming in Google+, but tags aren't distinguishable enough.
Alan Peery I guess I've never noticed that as a problem. But then, my experience with hashtags has been:
ReplyDelete1) tumblr (no "groups")
2) Google+ (hashtags? Haha, don't make me laugh)
3) pluspora (no "groups" ... a lot like tumblr really)
That said, tumblr does have different fandoms and different sorts of de facto "groups". I haven't noticed it as an issue.
Memetic polution is common. Slight specificity almost alway defeats that. It's an intrinsic nature of any gamed information channel.
ReplyDeleteBanning attackers helps.
Look at the types of propaganda research, esp. RAND, IFTF, Clay Shirky, danah boyd, Kate Starbird, Zynep Tufekci, Shoshana Zuboff, Herman & Chomsky, Hanah Arendt, Frankfurt School, & more.
Disinformation, misinformation, firehose, distraction, intimidation. All attack epistemic trust.
Just as an example: any time some hashtag or even starts trending, you see all sorts of spam surfacing around it on Twitter and YouTube.
ReplyDeleteThere ... are relatively few controls around this that seem to work, and a few possible solutions might actually make the problem worse. Say, "wisdom of the crowds" -- if you're faced with an even modestly resourced, but highly-motivated adversary who wants to get a message out, they pollute the channel (here, a search pattern) with crap, and (from the same or other accounts) flag competing messages as spam.
Ultimately that's a pattern that should be detectable by some means, but the way mediated comms channels work is by stripping virtually all context. It's hard to build durable trust.
(Though also ... in really odd ways ... sometimes relatively easy. When I was blocked by Google in my Edward Morbius account, I set up another, "The Real Slim Shady" -- with irony strongly intended -- and pretty quickly re-established most of my significant connections. The ability to vouch for that account from other sites helped greatly, as did the fact that I wasn't under some heavy reputation attack by an adversary, just Google's DoS.)
Edward Morbius I wonder does an effective search need hastags, provided you use strong keywords, that should suffice.
ReplyDeleteMartha Magenta Diaspora lacks full-text search, so hashtags are all you've got.
ReplyDeletePublic content can be externally indexed, but there's a considerable amount of non-public interactions.
This is a major crimp on my own usage style. I really like to be able to search my own content. I can download that and post it on an alternative archive, but that scales poorly to others.
I've been thinking generally of the distributed search problem and ways in which that might be accomplished, while supporting privacy and distribution-scope limitations. It's a sticky problem.
Edward Morbius Is diaspora searchable outside of the site?
ReplyDeleteMartha Magenta Public posts, via external search engines, yes: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe index quality varies -- I've not been finding my recent posts showing up immediately. The uptick in both posting and search activity may change this.
Mastodon has been very well indexed, FWIW.
Edward Morbius thanks - useful info!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Alan Peery. I like both Communities and Collections very much, but they ought to be more interchangeable. They should be more like labels in gmail : you can apply as many as you want, so messages are discoverable in multiple places. Then something you post to a Community and a Collection would be visible to everyone following either of those without you having to share it multiple times.
ReplyDeleteCommunities are a good way to meet new people, but all large groups contain a certain fraction of people behaving like assholes. There is always some fraction of the audience who completely misunderstand what everyone else thinks of as obvious, or some fraction of genuine trolls who slip through the net. And too many people in a discussion can quickly become an overwhelming flood of information. So Communities are important, but for me the really interesting stuff goes on directly in individual feeds. Hence it's useful to have as many ways as possible to discover interesting individuals.
Rhys Taylor people behaving like assholes etc - that is due to poor moderation. A well-moderated community should have a clear set of rules and code of conduct - this is especially important with large comms. It works. Just don't allow it. Ban them. They can always go and set up their own community and do as they wish. Just not in your house.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor Communities (including this one) suffer from abysmally poor moderation controls.
ReplyDeleteThere's no moderator back-channel, moderators have very limited content control (mostly limited to removing, blocking, banning, and reporting comments, posts, and users). There's no log of which mods did what (combine this with no backchannel for Endless Funtimes, though we've been avoiding that here so far). As with so much else on G+ and Google generally, G+ Communities read like a project somebody got interested in for a few weeks, spun some stuff out onto, and then got bored and wandered off.
That's the problem unpaid Free Software development is supposed to have. But Google?
(There are things Google does well. Stable and robust infrastructure and performance notably. I'm getting annoyed at Diaspora's lag, though my instance has been up and stable for the past few days.)
Rhys Taylor I was thinking mostly of posting to multiple collections of my own. Your example of collection(s) + community(ies) is even more powerful.
ReplyDelete