Preferred Circles. Communities require moderators and they can't always keep up with the garbage posts and others don't try. Circles was self moderating, you'd join a shared circle, pour people in your own relevantly named Circles if you really liked their posts or conversely you uncircled them from the shared circle if you thought they were garbage and your feed remained relevant and clean.
I'm with Gregory Bagshaw on this one.. communities were sometimes a pain.. for posting my own junk, I often preferred collections over communities, to which I rarely ever posted. I had perfect control over who could post anything in a collection.... Me..
I like communities for finding new people with shared interests - but circles were what made me fall in love with G+
I liked when we could give different weightings to different circles, to control what showed up in our streams. Having that with communities too would solve the previously mentioned issues
Initially, I prefered circles more but that was when many of my friends from real life joined as well. After they left I became a fan of communities where I learned a lot. (Like this one, for example, made me rethink the purpose of social medias, internet giants etc.)
Interesting subtle difference between circles and communities. For me having them together works makes sense. Communities for finding people and circles for keeping my own feed streams
I've been very interested in interest-based social networking for a long time, trying to understand why they don't succeed at scale, ex: Google+. Any thoughts about that ? Fern Kali Edward Morbius Tomáš Jakl
+Prasad Pilla I know you didn't ask but my thoughts as to why interest-based doesn't always do well because people pick up and drop interests pretty rapidly. The attention span wains. Tomáš Jakl made a good point when he mentioned he had irl friends on G+ at one time but most left. Were they bored?
it gets pretty cheeky after awhile people become proprietary and some of the circles/community became clicks, sometimes within the communities it kind of felt like if you didn't have the same thoughts and ideas as the rest of the group of people commenting then you would get the cold shoulder or muted/banned. Some banning was needed but some others were just power play. people tend to distance themselves from those behaviors after certain amount of time. If the person with the different view wasn't coming back to participate/banned all of the excitement of the discourse became boring and moderators and g+plusser would just abandoned the community. Even when the communities tried to hold it together, spam, trolls and advertising would overload the steam because there was no one to moderate.
Prasad Pilla I don't know why G+ failed, except that Google never argued with all the reports that it was failing, a ghost town. I know so many people who wouldn't join in the first place because they saw (and believed) those reports. I feel like that had a lot to do with it. This place is great!
Prasad Pilla I think that G+ failed because 1) it was invitation only when everybody wanted to try it out, 2) there was no feature similar to "events" on FB. I remember that it didn't feel much social when it was released. It wasn't for your everyday life online. Instead, it was only for discussions (which, at that time wasn't enough). Remember, FB's big thing was also games at that time...
Later my friends left because it hadn't attracted enough momentum.
I see the value in G+ in being able to meaningfully discuss with people which I've never met, about topics most of my friends wouldn't care about (e.g. linux, liero, tea, ... :-)). For social interaction of my real life friends I'll still keep FB but I need to replace G+ with a topic-oriented platform. I'm gonna really miss communities but I'm not willing to go to MeWe just because of that.
I ended up largely using Circles to categorise incoming flows rather than outgoing, by interest level. That's paying off now, as I can go through these from highest to lowest priority to harvest contacts.
I also used them to tag annoying or noxious profiles -- spammers, trolls, and the like. Usually as an interim to banning.
And I used them as a sort of ACL -- access control list -- to enable or disable comments and notifications by users.
I mostly posted to Collections, once they became available, as those allowed me to topically organise what I was posting. This let people opt out of specific content, but did not allow them to categorise their own inflows by topic, which turns out to have been an eternal failing of G+.
I used Communities very little. A few times early on, mostly larger ones, which I found to be unmanageable noisefests. The inability to filter by users within Communities turned into a massive liability. The poor moderation tools, proliferation of Communities, and as a consequence of both, almost universally abysmal moderation practices, made Communities almost wholly worthless, especially at scale. There were exceptions, but they're notable as such.
I'd sort of accidentally created a small, private, and very successful community, that grew to about 50 members, all very high-quality signal. That to me was close to the ideal size for an active discussion, with about 6-12 members dominating the discussion for the most part. I've seen larger communities, and G+MM at 4,100 members is still functioning quite well. The moderation tools have improved markedly, though and we're not hesitant to use them when necessary, though we ask for compliance first.
(And for those wondering, John's reined me in a few times as well. I comply ;-)
Having a back-channel for moderator discussions also helps tremendously, and yes, we have a small "back office" for discussing the main channel and noting actions we've been taking (mostly). In the absence of a moderation log, that's essential.
The fact that posts in Communities are a weird hybrid of "author owns, but Community mods can influence" is a design bug. It's caused numerous issues, is easily abused, and can lead to tremendous confusion. That's why we ask authors to not remove comments, or close comments, unless asked.
I'd prefer some sort of CMS. For support type stuff, StackExchange works pretty well (moderators can even rewrite questions to be more appropriate). I've used Reddit, and its moderation (and posting) tools are hugely superior to Google's though the Notifications dynamic is broken, and conversations tend to die.
Merry Weathers open to everyone's thoughts, just tagged people who already participated. Completely agree with you about the fact that people get bored pretty quick. I think that's because groups and communities are like black boards, everyone writes on the same board and the probability of individual finding things relevant goes down. Do you think it works if content reaches individuals one-one and topic/community is a connection factor rather than a common place?
Prasad Pilla your right. Some of it I think because attention span and the influencers. Everyone wants to follow a influencers and comment on those particular threads. Unknowns go by the way side. Some people got influencer status but then they would start trying to drive clicks and pluses, drive people to paywalls, so if you didn't want to or couldn't afford to pay you were put outside the conversation. That was a big deterrent for me. Also some links and websites may not be trusted to click and open, the trolls/spammers made sure to introduce this aspect.
Edward Morbius considering that Dunbar’s number for humans should be about 150, it makes sense that functioning communities will peak between 50 and 100 members.
Jose Pina Coelho Edward Morbius Merry Weathers and everyone Very interesting perspectives and data. This is feedback and thoughts are particularly important to me because of a product(https://tribyo.com) that I am working on. All of you have a deep understanding and experience of virtual communities, it will be great if you can look at it let me know your thoughts. I am trying to solve one-one and small group conversation and information streams.
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Preferred Circles. Communities require moderators and they can't always keep up with the garbage posts and others don't try. Circles was self moderating, you'd join a shared circle, pour people in your own relevantly named Circles if you really liked their posts or conversely you uncircled them from the shared circle if you thought they were garbage and your feed remained relevant and clean.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Gregory Bagshaw on this one.. communities were sometimes a pain..
ReplyDeletefor posting my own junk, I often preferred collections over communities, to which I rarely ever posted. I had perfect control over who could post anything in a collection.... Me..
I like communities for finding new people with shared interests - but circles were what made me fall in love with G+
ReplyDeleteI liked when we could give different weightings to different circles, to control what showed up in our streams. Having that with communities too would solve the previously mentioned issues
/sub
ReplyDeleteInitially, I prefered circles more but that was when many of my friends from real life joined as well. After they left I became a fan of communities where I learned a lot. (Like this one, for example, made me rethink the purpose of social medias, internet giants etc.)
ReplyDeleteInteresting subtle difference between circles and communities. For me having them together works makes sense. Communities for finding people and circles for keeping my own feed streams
ReplyDeleteI've been very interested in interest-based social networking for a long time, trying to understand why they don't succeed at scale, ex: Google+. Any thoughts about that ? Fern Kali Edward Morbius Tomáš Jakl
ReplyDeletePrasad Pilla Conversation scales poorly.
ReplyDelete+Prasad Pilla I know you didn't ask but my thoughts as to why interest-based doesn't always do well because people pick up and drop interests pretty rapidly. The attention span wains. Tomáš Jakl made a good point when he mentioned he had irl friends on G+ at one time but most left. Were they bored?
ReplyDeleteit gets pretty cheeky after awhile people become proprietary and some of the circles/community became clicks, sometimes within the communities it kind of felt like if you didn't have the same thoughts and ideas as the rest of the group of people commenting then you would get the cold shoulder or muted/banned. Some banning was needed but some others were just power play.
people tend to distance themselves from those behaviors after certain amount of time. If the person with the different view wasn't coming back to participate/banned all of the excitement of the discourse became boring and moderators and g+plusser would just abandoned the community. Even when the communities tried to hold it together, spam, trolls and advertising would overload the steam because there was no one to moderate.
I like communities and collections but seldom use circles.
ReplyDeleteCommunities are good because anyone can post, which means there's a lot of interest ideas and opinions.
I post to collections for the stuff that doesn't fit into any community I'm in.
Prasad Pilla I don't know why G+ failed, except that Google never argued with all the reports that it was failing, a ghost town. I know so many people who wouldn't join in the first place because they saw (and believed) those reports. I feel like that had a lot to do with it. This place is great!
ReplyDeletePrasad Pilla I think that G+ failed because 1) it was invitation only when everybody wanted to try it out, 2) there was no feature similar to "events" on FB. I remember that it didn't feel much social when it was released. It wasn't for your everyday life online. Instead, it was only for discussions (which, at that time wasn't enough). Remember, FB's big thing was also games at that time...
ReplyDeleteLater my friends left because it hadn't attracted enough momentum.
I see the value in G+ in being able to meaningfully discuss with people which I've never met, about topics most of my friends wouldn't care about (e.g. linux, liero, tea, ... :-)). For social interaction of my real life friends I'll still keep FB but I need to replace G+ with a topic-oriented platform. I'm gonna really miss communities but I'm not willing to go to MeWe just because of that.
Edward Morbius +Edward Morbius yes conversation usually is a very hard problem to solve.
ReplyDeletePrasad Pilla Answering your original question:
ReplyDeleteI ended up largely using Circles to categorise incoming flows rather than outgoing, by interest level. That's paying off now, as I can go through these from highest to lowest priority to harvest contacts.
I also used them to tag annoying or noxious profiles -- spammers, trolls, and the like. Usually as an interim to banning.
And I used them as a sort of ACL -- access control list -- to enable or disable comments and notifications by users.
I mostly posted to Collections, once they became available, as those allowed me to topically organise what I was posting. This let people opt out of specific content, but did not allow them to categorise their own inflows by topic, which turns out to have been an eternal failing of G+.
I used Communities very little. A few times early on, mostly larger ones, which I found to be unmanageable noisefests. The inability to filter by users within Communities turned into a massive liability. The poor moderation tools, proliferation of Communities, and as a consequence of both, almost universally abysmal moderation practices, made Communities almost wholly worthless, especially at scale. There were exceptions, but they're notable as such.
I'd sort of accidentally created a small, private, and very successful community, that grew to about 50 members, all very high-quality signal. That to me was close to the ideal size for an active discussion, with about 6-12 members dominating the discussion for the most part. I've seen larger communities, and G+MM at 4,100 members is still functioning quite well. The moderation tools have improved markedly, though and we're not hesitant to use them when necessary, though we ask for compliance first.
(And for those wondering, John's reined me in a few times as well. I comply ;-)
Having a back-channel for moderator discussions also helps tremendously, and yes, we have a small "back office" for discussing the main channel and noting actions we've been taking (mostly). In the absence of a moderation log, that's essential.
The fact that posts in Communities are a weird hybrid of "author owns, but Community mods can influence" is a design bug. It's caused numerous issues, is easily abused, and can lead to tremendous confusion. That's why we ask authors to not remove comments, or close comments, unless asked.
I'd prefer some sort of CMS. For support type stuff, StackExchange works pretty well (moderators can even rewrite questions to be more appropriate). I've used Reddit, and its moderation (and posting) tools are hugely superior to Google's though the Notifications dynamic is broken, and conversations tend to die.
Merry Weathers open to everyone's thoughts, just tagged people who already participated. Completely agree with you about the fact that people get bored pretty quick. I think that's because groups and communities are like black boards, everyone writes on the same board and the probability of individual finding things relevant goes down. Do you think it works if content reaches individuals one-one and topic/community is a connection factor rather than a common place?
ReplyDeleteFern Kali, Tomáš Jakl very valid points.
ReplyDeletePrasad Pilla your right. Some of it I think because attention span and the influencers. Everyone wants to follow a influencers and comment on those particular threads. Unknowns go by the way side. Some people got influencer status but then they would start trying to drive clicks and pluses, drive people to paywalls, so if you didn't want to or couldn't afford to pay you were put outside the conversation. That was a big deterrent for me. Also some links and websites may not be trusted to click and open, the trolls/spammers made sure to introduce this aspect.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius considering that Dunbar’s number for humans should be about 150, it makes sense that functioning communities will peak between 50 and 100 members.
ReplyDeleteJose Pina Coelho My data from G+ communities, a 36,000 community sample, shows peak per member activity at ~100 - 3,000 members.
ReplyDeleteIf we consider that over time, many members lapse, that may also fit with Dunbar's research.
Jose Pina Coelho Edward Morbius Merry Weathers and everyone Very interesting perspectives and data. This is feedback and thoughts are particularly important to me because of a product(https://tribyo.com) that I am working on. All of you have a deep understanding and experience of virtual communities, it will be great if you can look at it let me know your thoughts. I am trying to solve one-one and small group conversation and information streams.
ReplyDeletePrasad Pilla I'll try to give it a look-over. Pretty bandwidth-constrained these days though.
ReplyDeleteMy posts here and at reddit (/r/dredmorbius, /r/plexodus) will give a lot of insight on my views and thinking over the past few years.