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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Feel About the End Of Google+ ? (slashdot.org) 192

Posted by EditorDavid from the eve-of-destruction dept.
"On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts," Google has been warning since January.

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes "it's been grating on me for a while," asking "But is there any real harm here? Do you feel damaged?" On the one hand, my trust in the Google has certainly been damaged by profit-driven directional changes. On such grounds you could argue that the people who most trusted the Google may feel most victimized....

What is the value of IP? Do you feel you expressed or even created any interesting ideas through your use of Google+ as a discussion channel? If so, maybe you feel damaged because it's going away? (Yes, the Archive team wants to preserve it, but IP has to grow to be alive, and the archives aren't easy to search, to boot...)

I'm pretty sure that I started using Google+ a long time ago, back when my own sentiments towards the Google were much more positive. My negative framing of the question could be projection, so maybe your response may explain why it's really a good thing when the Google kills certain ideas?
The original submission also includes the bitter observation that "Innovation is supposed to be important to the Google. Isn't the Google giving us mixed signals here?" But how do Slashdot's readers feel?

Leave your own thoughts in the comments. How do you feel about the end of Google+ ?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ask Slashdot: How Do You Feel About the End Of Google+ ? More

Ask Slashdot: How Do You Feel About the End Of Google+ ?

Comments Filter:

  • Oh God! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31, 2019 @09:50PM (#58363900)

    Who the hell cares?!

  • At least they let you download your data (Score:5, Informative)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @09:52PM (#58363908) Journal

    You can use Google Takeout to download your data and rehost it elsewhere for any of their services. Do other major players make it convenient/possible to do that?

    • What, you think you own your data with the other players? Someone's delusional...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        What, you think you own your data with the other players? Someone's delusional...

        Step 1: Make up an unwarranted assumption about what somebody thinks

        Step 2: Criticise them for thinking the thing you assumed they thought.

        Step 3: Derp

    • Nintendo let you download an archive of your Miiverse posts when they shut down the service. I appreciated that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      I actually looked at the data. Without the structure it becomes almost completely meaningless, even though I created some of it.

      Some of the data appeared to be derived information that I couldn't interpret at all. Not even with imaginary numbers.

    • Hold on. You can DL your data, but they offer no way to merge that data into another account. Takeout is cool, but its one way only.

    • You can use Google Takeout to download your data and rehost it elsewhere for any of their services. Do other major players make it convenient/possible to do that?

      Yes. You can download your Facebook activity. Settings -> Your facebook information -> Download your information.

  • I got the requisite Google+ account when the hype train was in operation, but I won't notice it at all when the service goes away.

    • Re:Notice It? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @11:12PM (#58364176) Journal
      At the time, Facebook was making a lot of money, and winning a lot of advertiser interest, because they had the age and gender of their users. That is something advertisers care a lot about.

      So what did Google do? Created a clone of Facebook, got everyone's age and gender (and real name), harassed people until they gave up their information, then dropped it.

      Google+ was a data harvesting operation, nothing more.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        I think it's a major strain to describe Google+ as a clone of Facebook. Not even clear that it was a wannabe clone, though the google did want to get into the game. There were too many differences in the approaches of the two systems.

        If Google Plus had actually had some good ideas, then I think similar ideas would have appeared within Facebook. Have I overlooked something? I admit that I don't use Facebook much these days. (My FFF solution really worked much better than I expected in terms of cutting my mot

        • You're still looking at it as if you were the customer. The advertisers are the ones Google sells to, and Google+ got them what they wanted, which was your user info. Google analytics is kind of amazing these days.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            Basically concurrence, though I think the chronology is a bit confused. At first they didn't know who the customers were, but once they figured out where the money was coming from, of course they started following it. The businesses that don't manage to wrap themselves around the money are the businesses that go away, get crushed, or are bought out.

  • Google+ had all kinds of growing pains, typically involving the addition unnecessary whitespace. Plus tagging often worked very poorly, with everyone but the person you were trying to tag coming up in the list, and with it sorting and re-sorting itself under your mouse pointer (or finger) when you finally found them. But recently, they got everything working nicely, including translation. Therefore, it's sad to see it go, as it was the easiest social network to use with an international community.

    G+ never had many users, so this will not cause a lot of harm. I went to Pluspora so as to have an alternative to Facebook for things I actually want to post publicly. (If I cared whether people actually read what I said, I'd post somewhere other than either. More people probably read me here, for example.) But Google isn't actually killing it, they're just making it a feature only in their business office product. Perhaps they got tired of patrolling it for porn.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Thanks for the link to Pluspora. Sounds interesting, and I should have suggested including alternatives to Google+ (when I submitted the story).

      I'm also curious about what you think they got right? The only aspect I remember sort of liking about Google+ was the categorization of circles of interest.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        I'm also curious about what you think they got right?

        They got rid of the bad whitespace, they got plus tagging working like one expected, and it was just generally competent. I guess we were just the beta testers. It didn't cost me anything, and I don't depend on it for anything, so I'm not upset about it. It does confirm my opinion that Google feels free to discontinue things without any concern for the users, but that's not exactly a secret in any case. If one isn't even a paying customer, one doesn't have much right to complain. I think it would be unfair

    • Re:I'll miss it, esp. since they finally got it ri (Score:5, Informative)

      by dissy ( 172727 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @07:33AM (#58365248)

      G+ never had many users, so this will not cause a lot of harm.

      The only reason I even have a G+ account at all was due to the time they were forcing accounts on youtube.

      At the time they initially claimed it was just for the comment sections, so I ignored it since I don't comment.
      But for a short time they had some aggressive popup notices and wording that implied you would lose your subscriptions and custom saved playlists if you didn't upgrade.

      So yes G+ didn't have a lot of users, but it certainly had a whole lot of accounts made on threat of losing access to other services.
      I would only describe this as mildly annoying, but it seemed at the time that quite a number of people resented the forced signups.
      Even at only "mildly annoying", with not a single good thought about G+, that still ultimately sums up to a negative.

  • they'll ditch the moronic real names on youtube.

  • One down... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:02PM (#58363948)

    The end of Google+ is alright and all, but what we REALLY need is the end of Facebook. When that day comes there will be much rejoicing.

  • A mixture of bad and good ideas, not lasting (Score:3)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:04PM (#58363954)

    I thought Google+ had some interesting ideas going on. But something about using it for much at all really turned me off, even though for a while Google has some pro photographers heavily promoting it and it seemed to get some traction in that space...

    But that was the thing about Google+, it never got any traction for anyone without pressure from Google, so as soon as that pressure even lightened up support evaporated. You just can't have a social network no-one is on!

    I still can't put my figure though on why it never went anywhere with anyone I knew, when facebook and twitter lasted...

    In the end I'm actually pretty happy it's going away so I can stop feeling bad for not posting there. Now I can focus on not posting to just instagram and facebook.

    • Google use names for things that just don't help user who use things once in a while. eg Hangouts. I think it is some sort of skype or something but it is the stupidest name on earth. Can you tell someone in business meet you on hangouts for a quick catchup?

      I think the issue is google has lots of smart kids that want the world to conform to their little bubble of thinking, they do not put the customer first.

      Google+ was just a copy of facebook with no vision and no reason for people to use it, i.e. no c

    • Re:A mixture of bad and good ideas, not lasting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:29PM (#58364072) Homepage

      I still can't put my figure though on why it never went anywhere with anyone I knew,

      i wrote about this at the time. facebook is known for being non-mission-critical. if facebook doesn't like your use of its service, and terminates your account, so what, big deal.

      however as *actually happened* with several people, the forced requirement of an incredibly dangerous "real name" policy, if people joined up to google+ and refused to accept the dangerous requirement, ACCESS TO TEN YEARS OF EMAIL AND DOCS WAS TERMINATED WITHOUT WARNING. and there was absolutely no recovery mechanism.

      i have over 50,000 messages dating back 12 years, on which i critically rely for business and for coordinating software libre projects. termination of access to all of that would be catastrophic.

      i also wrote about why "real name" policies are incredibly dangerous. they break the rule that everyone knows: everyone KNOWS that you DO NOT TRUST an online identity. period.

      any Corporation that sets itself up as the "God Of Identity" is just... so wrong on so many levels, it's just not funny. youtube data breach only a few months ago. equifax data breach. ashley madison data breach. cambridge analytica. dozens more that can be found on https://haveibeenpwned.com/Pwn... [haveibeenpwned.com]

      *how many more* of these are we going to have to have before people start to wake up?

      • gmail (less likely yahoo) screwed up my moving of my yahoo email to gmail about 12 years ago. No yahoo mail was moved, yahoo mail was deleted on yahoo.

      • facebook is known for being non-mission-critical

        It is listed as as homepage in vast majority of restaurants I have encountered in my real life.

      • Re:A mixture of bad and good ideas, not lasting (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @07:28AM (#58365224) Homepage

        have over 50,000 messages dating back 12 years, on which i critically rely for business

        ^^^ !!! Don't use free services who provide no service-level agreement and no contact information or tech support for mission critical operations!

      • *how many more* of these are we going to have to have before people start to wake up?

        Good question. Why are you continuing to store important data on an advertising platform? Wouldn't it make more sense to spend $2-$5/month on your own email/doc storage? When are YOU going to wake up?

      • *how many more* of these are we going to have to have before people start to wake up?

        At least one more.

      • Email loss wouldn't be catastropic if you have all that copied locally and backed up elsewhere.

        I use Thunderbird on my Linux installs to view my accumulated webmail accounts and keep local and archive copies. On Windows boxes I use Thunderbird Portable which makes backup even more convenient. I just backup the program folder instead of my profile. Either way it's easy to do. There's no excuse for not backing up important webmail. If I lose account access I lose no content and can immediately inform my conta

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • But I am really tired of google killing off services. Even if few people use it, it can really screw over those who do. For a company trying to break into corporate (G Suite) this kind of thing seems to happen all to often.

  • It was a fair service at best and I never saw anything in it that differentiated it from other platforms out there.

    Hopefully we'll start seeing a culling of social media platforms with the remaining ones excelling at:
    - User security
    - Dealing with assholes ^H^H^H^H^H Trolls
    - Identifying and removing fake news

  • About how I feel about Orcut (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:10PM (#58363982) Homepage Journal

    Google had a social network called Orcut, after an engineer there who was named Orcut and is still trying his hand at social networking. [orcut.com] That was Google's social network before Google+. It played well in South America, I think, but didn't catch on as much elsewhere. I don't remember how it finally played out. We just have to wait a while, and Google will do it's third social network.

    • Oops. Wrong spelling: Orkut [orkut.com].

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Lisias ( 447563 )

      Orkut. :)

      Yeah, that was a good Social Network. Your own timeline was your timeline, it was not merged on a huge wall of things that you most doesn't care.

      Communities was the keyword there. And it worked very well. But then Google decided it should promote Google Wave, that flopped. People didn't saw a need for Wave, as Orkut was already good enough.

      Then Google killed Orkut, and tried to shove Google+ on us. Interesting enough, G+ was good and could had become the "New Orkut" - but Google knows better, and d

      • Well, and Gmail. The principle developer of which gave them "don't be evil" and of course he is now gone and they erased the moto.

      • Then Google killed Orkut, and tried to shove Google+ on us

        You left out the reason. Orkut was conquered by Brazil, and became worthless for anyone else. Every day it was just a bunch of add requests from Brazilians I'd never heard of. Google wanted an international community, not just Brazilians, which is why they cancelled it.

  • The assumption here is that I feel anything about Google+, or even remember that it's still technically not ended. Both assumptions are of course, in error.

  • iGoogle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:16PM (#58364022) Journal

    I don't care about Google+, but I'm still broken up about the end of iGoogle. That was the best start page I've ever used. It had these widgets for Gmail and RSS and other good stuff so everything was in once place. Smooth integration with Google Calendar. I've been through every iGoogle copy, like start.me, and Chrome's Awesome New Tab extension and a bunch of others, and they're never good, or good for very long.

    I've never really forgiven Google for killing off iGoogle. It was a tool I used all the time and now it's gone. Those bastards.

    • I’ve been using ustart.org since they killed off iGoogle. It’s not quite as user-friendly, but it gets the job done.

      But, yeah. I think I liked iGoogle more than any other Google offering.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kbg ( 241421 )

      Yes same here. iGoogle was the most useful thing on the internet. Now I use ighome.com it's almost like iGoogle and it's free.

  • Google forced everyone into Google+ one day. As such, I'm glad it's being reverted.

    It has the extra-good side effect of creating an event we can point to (yet another one) in showing why Google shouldn't be given all that much trust- either during its birth, or during its execution.

    I'm sad for the people who used it, of course- a competitor to facebook would have been nice, and some people just enjoyed the fact that it was a social network that did what they wanted.

  • Wish it was really going away (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:19PM (#58364036)

    I work in academia, and Google+ is continuing on, zombie-like, there as part of G Suite for Education. It’s the worst of both worlds - a small user base means Google will pay absolutely no attention to it, but when I go to delete my G+ account I get dire warnings regarding all sorts of data being deleted from other places as well.

    • I work in academia, and Google+ is continuing on, zombie-like, there as part of G Suite for Education. It’s the worst of both worlds - a small user base means Google will pay absolutely no attention to it

      I think it's more likely that it will evolve towards becoming more of an enterprise-focused communications tool. The internal G+ is heavily used by a lot of Google employees, and I believe it's used quite a bit by many GSuite customers outside of education.

  • ... that I could use on a lot of websites, but that's about it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gilgongo ( 57446 )

      Don't worry, Google single sign-on isn't going away. It's just their social network that's being deleted.

  • I found Google+ (G+) a far more sane place than any other social media site. It did not serve the same purpose as every other site, it was unique in many ways. I will miss it terribly. I have successfully migrated over to MEWE, which is becoming somewhat more like G+ every day, and expect it to provide everything G+ did. In time. I can understand that G+ was becoming more of a liability every day, and under attack from governments and cyber criminals. I cannot blame Google. But I will still miss it.

  • What was Google +? It was like Fakebook, except NOT from FakeBook.

    I tried to export my Google+ data. The only thing was, after all that time, I didn't have any.

    • What was Google +? It was like Fakebook, except NOT from FakeBook.

      Pretty much, and at the time of it going live Facebook had offended lots of people over something and they were looking for someplace else to go. It's big feature was the ability to organize you contacts in to groups and manage them that way. It was a feature that FB did not have at the time and even worked well with people who did not have G+ accounts as it worked off any email. However, it did not integrate with their calendar, and pretty much everybody using FB was using it to schedule, organize, and tra

  • It's almost like (Score:3)

    by TheRealQuestor ( 1750940 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @11:06PM (#58364158)
    It's almost like it never even happened really. If facebook were to close shop tonight 1/10th of the world would shit themselves. G+ close and it's like, meh nothing of value is lost, move along, nothing to see here and in 2 weeks nobody will even remember lol.
  • Pre 2012, before penguin came along. G was so much easier to manipulate... :|
  • On April 2nd Google will announce that they will continue with Google+.

  • 2757 days (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mseeger ( 40923 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @12:12AM (#58364292)

    I started posting on G+ on July 3rd 2011 and stopped on January 19th 2019. That is 2757 days.

    In that time I posted 2747 posts (not counting private posts) which received 17494 +1, 10357 comments and 2469 reshares.

    As all good things tend to, this too had to end. In this case it is not entirely voluntary but Google was forcing my hands. I do not stay at pubs till the innkeeper throws me out, so I was leaving there too at a time of my choosing.

    This would usually also be the place where I would thank Google for giving us the opportunity of this social media. But currently my feelings are rather "f*ck you" for how the closure is handled. They burnt more trust than most companies ever get from me in a lifetime. I do not appreciate getting lied to and shunned. As mentioned elsewhere, one of my plans in 2019 is to move every possible service of mine away from Google.

    I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack threads on fire off the shoulder of Brexit. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Gamer Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to quit.

    • The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Google+.

  • They're not interested in niche products (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lurks ( 526137 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @12:24AM (#58364322) Homepage

    Do you remember how the press endless banged on about how Google+ was small and that it was 'beaten' by Facebook? People are still doing it here. Well, I used it a lot. It was awesome. However Google killed it off before this actual shutdown.

    Before G+ was a thing, it was Buzz. Buzz was a locally centred discussion platform and it ended up being an interesting way to establish a social graph. I met some really interesting people in my city and we had many deep conversations. Buzz moved to G+, and everything continued there. Then one day they decided that photos were where it was at and destroyed the platform as a discussion board. Design changes just meant that images were kept and text was shortened to two lines in a feed. It quickly became just another image based platform of narcissists. I don't know how it did numbers wise after that, but it totally killed the platform for most of the people who were there from the start. My archive of G+ shows that I crafted a load of posts that took a lot of time. I was using it in place of a blog, and I benefited from people actually reading and interacting with my posts. Not any more.

    It seems to me that it was this theme which shaped the way Google approached all of their products and G+ itself is just the latest. They hated the negative press. If they were seen to be second to someone doing billions, then better not to do it at all. That shift right is what made me, and anecdotally a lot of my friends, change out our view of Google. I don't suppose there was ever a time Google cared what we thought, it's just that now it was clear.

    Fuck you Google.

  • I really liked Google+. It was a great place if you wanted to share your hobby work. Trying to move on to MeWe now.

  • It was a shame that they tried to ape Facebook. They should've done the exact opposite and let Google+ be a sort of high Profile social Plattform. I did like the features and app integration. ... But I don't miss it too much either, despite being a heavy Google user.

  • It was nice when it started ... (Score:3)

    by hholzgra ( 6914 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @04:51AM (#58364828) Homepage

    with circles giving you easy control over what taget audience sees what, and a rather text centric stream.

    Nice alternative to facebook ... but then they failed to built up on that differentiation, and rather tried to become more like facebook themselves.

    There was no need for a second facebook that's just the same though ...

  • That was the first thing i did upon reading about it.

    And to be honest i still don't know. There's some google stuff around, like google (search engine), google documents, gmail, and it is connected to youtube too, but it's often hard to see where one thing ends and another begins.

    To my current understanding google+ is the google-version of facebook (but most likely i got that wrong or at best only partially correct).

  • Yes, I know Google Books hasn't gone away completely, but it feels close enough to dead these years... This story and topic has gotten me to thinking about lots of dashed hopes.

    The feature Google Books never had (at least as far as I could tell) would have been a virtual bookshelf feature. The idea would be to see the books that are shelved near a particular book, though you'd need to filter it in various ways for practical use. Perhaps the virtual shelf would be limited to books published in the last 20 ye

  • Saw what you *tried* to do there, but I' ve already had my Starbucks Treinta this mornin'

  • I don't care about G+... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ambient Sheep ( 458624 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @06:38AM (#58365040)

    ...but I'm extremely pissed off about the forthcoming death of Hangouts.

    Once upon a time we has MSN Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google Talk/Chat/Voice to name but three. Now all gone (or about to go).

    Surely somebody can supply a text and occasional voice/video chat program that will work on Windows, Linux, iOS & Android? In a world this big is that too much to ask? Apparently so, unless someone can tell me better...

    • Doesn't Skype meet those requirements?

      • Doesn't Skype meet those requirements?

        In theory, although as has already been said it's absolutely massive, so much so that my older machines won't even run it.

        Last time I used it it was also flakey, horrible, every single update made it worse to use, and last I heard it didn't run properly on Linux (although that may have been sorted out now, I don't know, I gave up on it).

        I basically try to forget it exists, as everyone should.

        Although not the most wonderful software in the world, Hangouts (neé Gtalk/Gchat/GoogleVoice) just works, and ev

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      didn't hangouts become duo?

    • It's got wide platform support. No video chat but it does have voice and text chat.

      • No video chat

        And there you said it.

        However since I don't often use video, it is one of the future options I'm considering. But then what do I do when I *do* want to use video?

  • It's very Brave of you, Minister, to shut down a leading competitor to Facebook just when Facebook is getting into trouble with the courts. Giving up all that opportunity to "spend more time with your family".

    For people who didn't watch the British comedy, initiatives that would lose you elections were considered "brave", and anyone who got kicked out was "retiring to spend more time with their family".

  • Why are we still talking about this? Just delete the whole goddamn thing and be done with it... who the fuck even used G+ in the first place?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      A lot of people. It was the best platform so social media if you liked to curate it.

      I organized a lot through g+ because it was trivial to do.

  • ... is a buzzword new to me of late and I think it's very descriptive of what happened to Google+.

    I have a set, fixed, amount of hours and minutes each day to do stuff. Google+ competed with TV, Facebook, forums, exercise, guitar playing and singing, photography and fiddling with computer shit (I'm retired IT).

    I have a Google+ account because I have legit and burner Gmail accounts, but I never posted a goddam thing.

    I can't say whether Google+ is a good witch or a bad witch.

    I was not willing and able to pay

  • sucks (Score:3)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {dnaltropnidad}> on Monday April 01, 2019 @10:16AM (#58366008) Homepage Journal

    sucks, it was the best social media platform out there. It was so easy to curate, and create groups(circles) to maintain a sane feed.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Circles was genius (Score:3)

    by Kevin108 ( 760520 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @11:02AM (#58366314) Homepage

    Being able to use Circles to easily steer conversations only to those contacts who would be interested, rather than spamming everyone's feed with everything, was an amazing feature. But great features don't mean anything if there's nobody around to use them with.

    • Agreed. Amazing that I read all the comments =>2 and saw only two mentions of the circles, which seemed brilliant to me. The ability to direct a post toward my family or my out of town friends or friends interested in linux or whatever seems absolutely necessary to making the thing usable.

      Circles took a tiny bit of effort to set up and maintain, but the payoff seemed huge. I was drifting toward biting the bullet and signing up for a FB account right when G+ was launched. The obvious superiority of the

  • The UI was usable. Most of the forums I'm trying to use are terrible, and the others are not very popular.

    The dilution is unfortunate. I can't yet get the quality and volume of content I had on Google+, and it's going to be a while.

    Many of the forums I'm being encouraged to use are focused on free exchange, freedom from moderation. I'm blocking what I don't like, since censoring my own feed is my own choice. But it's nasty out there.

    All in all, Google will come back with another try at this. They just didn'

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