I find it incredibly amusing and also very frustrating that all the top comments to this article are simply G+ re-shares that add absolutely no value to the comments section and simply more garbage the reader has to sift through in order to view legit comments.
>>"Google has been doing some rethinking"
thanks I already read that
>>"#googleplusupdate #youtube "
thank you that was valuable
>>[another summary of the article I just read]
This is also one of my major complaints with youtube. I find it hard enough just to follow a single youtube comment thread because:
1. Everyone appears to be speaking a dialect of english that is understandable seemingly to everyone but myself - some sort of strange mixture of 90's IRC speak with some klingon thrown in.
2. People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username.
John Smith: That was a great video
> Jane Smith: +Bubba I agree
me: "who the heck is Jane talking to?"
3. Then finally there're all of those G+ reshares:
Yep, it's frustrating. Youtube comments really are hopelessly broken.
Re-shares are not good reading. They are written by users for their followers, not for the people on the actual video page. As you said, they have zero value.
When I first noticed this way back when Google started publishing re-share comments under the videos, I would reply to those comments with remarks such as "I already knew that; yes I know what the video is; why are you repeating the video name"... and some people responded with "what are you talking about" because they didn't even know their re-share comments were being published on the video page. That's how broken the comments are.
I highly recommend using Alien Tube [0]. It fetches reddit comments for the video, it's really well done. If it finds nothing, it displays the orignal YouTube comments.
Facebook has the same problem. Any reasonably popular feed, such as I f'ing love science has completely worthless comments, because 99% are them just people tagging their friends.
Google+ is really its own thing, and very valuable as such, but Google keeps trying to make it into something it's not.
You see Google+ interaction where you expect simple comments. I often see Youtube comments in Google+ threads because the thread happened to start with a video, and therefore automatically becomes a Youtube comment for barely literate Youtubers to spit their bile at. Or I see a G+er accidentally post a Youtube comment as a nonsensical G+ post.
Google tries to treat everything the same, but they need to recognize that different things are different things. I don't want my G+ stuff on Youtube, and I don't want Youtube stuff on G+. You don't want G+ reshares in the article's comment section.
I'm glad they finally seem to be coming to their senses. Would have been nice if that'd happened a few years earlier.
To be fair, to take the YouTube comment section, which in the days before G+ was known as the second greatest online cesspool after 4chan, and actually make it worse is an achievement of epic proportions.
You forgot to mention how the comment system bubbles up the most controversial and divisive comments, giving them the spotlight while productive conversations get lost in the noise.
Tumblr has very much the same program regarding reshares. Although I'm not sure if Tumblr even wants to foster discussion on their site--people do it any way, of course, quoting each other, but most Tumblr themes make these kind of discussions look awkward and hard to follow. Nested quotes get thinner and thinner, until you have just one word per line, sticking halfway out the container.
Since google knows everything, they could easily hide comments from people that speak a different "dialect" than you do. For example, they could show only comments from people that also frequently visit HN.
It's incredible how lightly they have thrown away the Google+ Account For Everything stance given how merciless they were in imposing it at the time. The wails from YouTube in particular have only just died down.
Kudos to them, but a lot of pain could have been avoided if they did all this listening back then, instead of waiting until their thing was clearly dead.
Honestly, I think the sticking point on most of it was the Real Name policy. Had they stopped the delusion from the outset that they could be a Facebook competitor and simply made Google+ a correlating landing page for your online persona, rather than your real identity, I think it would have worked. I wouldn't necessarily mind everyone knowing that AdmiralAsshat likes Black Sabbath music videos on Youtube, hangs out on C programming boards on G+, and comments on various political stories on Slate--I sometimes share my handles on various online media circles anyway. Having them all tied to a single login would not necessarily be a bad thing. It's not until they demand that they must know my real name to do so (combined with the fact that, being an Android user, Google knows my phone number and personal billing address) that the idea of Google+ suddenly looks toxic.
This is a good step, although the well has already been poisoned.
I'm not sure. Admitted, I'm not a fan of Google and maybe a bit grumpy, but I read this blog entry as "Now everyone will need a G+ account, but it won't have a public profile".
That said, the distinction between
Google account
G+ Account
Google Profile
is lost on me, I'm genuinely confused about the past and present state of these things. It feels like "G+ Accounts" are supposed to be the new "Google Accounts"? Like you could've had a Google Account without a Google Page or Google Profile or whatever that was called?
I .. don't see what's changing. No reason to grab the pitchfork, but no reason for cheers or kudos either.
They haven't thrown it away. It's still a shared Google Account For Everything. The distinction they're making now is that they're no longer requiring that account to be tied to a "G+ sharing stream" in a publicly exposed way, which was never the most essential part of anything for them.
This is them finally admitting they were being evil. They put their empire and monopoly ambitions (defeat Facebook and dominate social networking as they do search and ads) ahead of the actual interests of their users.
On the other hand, any big change done by google will be heavily criticized most likely, independent of whether they are "right" or "wrong", and to certain extent they will have to push through it to see if it's a positive change or a negative one.
> It's incredible how lightly they have thrown away the Google+ Account For Everything stance given how merciless they were in imposing it at the time.
This is confusing to me. What IS a "Google Account"? Is it my gmail? That makes no sense to me, it's an email service. A "Google Account" sounds like I work at Google. If you were to tell me I had a "Google Account", I would assume it's Google+.
Google messed up when it tried to make some master account with Google+. Maybe everything could be incorporated into one account, but the way they've done it is one of the most complicated and confusing systems I've seen in computer engineering, and that's pretty sad considering it's Google.
Take YouTube. When I go there now, I have my Google+ account, but I have my old YouTube account that has been consumed by the Google+ account, but yet it's still separate on YouTube?? Now when I use YouTube, I have to make sure it's my old YouTube account being selected instead of my Google+ one. Why is this so hard? What's going to happen to my old YouTube account when it gets owned by this new "Google Account"?
If you can't do this right, which is obviously an issue, then just keep everything separate. Stop Google-fying services that are separate.
I find it incredibly convenient not to have to log into drive, gmail, maps, youtube, etc. separately. They all work seamlessly together, and I know I sound like a shill for saying so, but I've had nothing but positive experiences with it.
I wish they would just get it right, and let me create different accounts for the apps I want to use. I just want a YouTube account. No Gmail. No G+. No tying my adwords account to anything else unless I request it.
This is extremely simple, and Google has made this horribly invasive and it's flat out broken at this point.
Honestly, the whole account "integration" just pisses me off. I want my Gmail account to be separated from my Youtube account and from the Maps account.
The main reason (by far) Google unified them is so they they can more easily track everyone across multiple properties.
> This is confusing to me. What IS a "Google Account"? Is it my gmail? That makes no sense to me, it's an email service. A "Google Account" sounds like I work at Google. If you were to tell me I had a "Google Account", I would assume it's Google+.
It is a gmail account. Every time you are prompted to enter your google account, what do you enter? Yup, it was that simple.
"When we launched Google+, we were scared of Facebook winning over the internet and knew how powerful the network effect is. So we decided on a douchebag move - abuse all of our monopolistic powers and superior engineering in order to shove a Facebook killer down our users' throat at maximum speed, integrating it with each and every google service in existence (whether it made any sense or not) and killing social features that actually work in exchange to experimental G+ social features that might work eventually. According to our analytics, it didn't work, so... Never mind."
Why is this not a Google+-post?!
Why should we use it if even google isn't using it?
But maybe they tried signing up but failed getting a custom G+-url.
We see that you registered [email protected], but we can't let you use google.com/+google, why don't you use google.com/+google1425 and youtube.com/c/12868126nvesfz1761, which you can change to youtube.com/c/google6823_xw once you reach 500 subscribers.
Using the google sign-up process was one of the most infuriating things and definitely one of my worst UI/UX experiences.
In order to create a consistent online profile, it's ideal to choose a name which is available on all major social networks.
Google is just not capable of offering a service like that:
You can't check in advance if a given g+ or youtube name is available. If you sign up for a gmail-account, the new account [email protected] doesn't mean you get youtube.com/newname or plus.google.com/+newname.
A custom youtube name oddly gets created at /c/username and not youtube.com/username and I somehow had to switch profiles (I think between my youtube account, for which I signed up using my gmail-account and my g+-profile which was created when signing up for gmail?!) while logged in into youtube to make changes which was extremely confusing.
Getting a custom g+url is even more difficult, as google adds some patronizing and suggests a name, which can not be edited.
Why is it not possible to register a consistent name accross all google products with 1 signup process: a gmail-account, a youtube username, a g+ account? Creating a new page or signing up at any other social media site maybe takes 5 minutes, the "Google experience" took 1 afternoon (!) with not the desired result.
Can we talk a bit about Google Groups also ? Dear Google, please do something about Google groups... It's just unusable. Everytime I see a Google groups link I just don't click. The contrast is horrible, the padding is making 3/4 of the screen useless, it takes forever to load, when you click on something it's lagging again... And the worst part in all of this is that people are still using it, please do something about it...
"Don't be evil, but only after trying really hard to be so, and then grudgingly accepting that perhaps your users have alternatives that they might avail themselves of, and capitulate"
It's not as catchy, but perhaps a little more honest.
Though not the end of G+, hopefully it will be the end of G+ as we know it. From day one G+ should have simply been a social mesh between the many (very) popular Google properties like YouTube, Play, Maps, etc. Making it a standalone application was their fatal mistake, and here's hoping Bradley can lead them towards becoming a social utility instead of a social platform.
Hopefully they decouple G+ from Youtube for everyone. The G+ comments are somewhat unhelpful below a Youtube video.
Before there were always discussions with answers, nowadays you see mainly "check out this video my friends on G+" kind of "trash" in the video comments.
The OP links to a corresponding YouTube blog post with more specifics about how the G+ rollback affects the YouTube service (as of today, YouTube comments will only show up on YouTube, and not on G+, and vice-versa):
It also mentions improvements to the ranking system "that reduces the visibility of junk comments. It’s working—the rate of dislikes on comments has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube."...Is there a whitepaper or engineering blog post about their technical approach to this?
They mean "Using Google with a Google account but without a Google+ profile", not "Using Google without a Google account". Google pushes really hard for people to be logged into Google. Google search results pages have a whiny banner ad if you don't log into Google. (And it won't go away if you have their cookies blocked.)
Incidentally, Android phones work fine with no Google account. If you buy the phone new and unlocked, click "Later" when it asks for your Google account, and delete the "Google first time activation" app, they're fine.
A surprisingly large number of FOSS developers (though mostly Linux developers in particular) use G+ and post interesting status updates on it. That's the extent to which I care about it.
I've been confused about Google+ for the longest time, wondering what reason there was for Google+ to exist in the first place, other than the (perceived) low cost of getting users (via marketing on their search page).
What new value does Google+ add? Does anybody sign up for Google+ for reasons other than 1) Google Hangouts, or 2) accident? How is Google+ "quickly becoming a place where people engage..." and yet I don't know anybody who uses it? Am I hanging out with all the wrong people? I don't really actively engage with people on Facebook, but everybody I know uses Facebook in some capacity and people talk about it from time to time. I've never heard a single person in my life talk about Google+, other than, "I think you have to have a Google+ account to..." (e.g., Hangouts).
It's about time, though mostly for Google's sake. I personally don't care if I can't review apps or create YouTube channels or do anything that requires Google+ as the features that have required it are mostly useless or I have found alternatives. It is annoying that I would even be asked to review apps constantly, however, when I'm not signed up for the idiotic Google+. I actually wouldn't mind reviewing some apps, but not at the expense of having to start Google+. The Google+ fiasco has mainly hurt Google itself by making them lose all their customers who didn't sign up for Google+ from such features as well as the unfortunate developers who rely on good app ratings that they won't get now because Google essentially put up a nasty firewall around that system. Then again, there's nothing new about Google or Apple pushing its own woes onto developers, so I assume mobile developers have made their peace with the tactics of their industry.
I honestly think G+ had some great ideas, but they just bungled too much.
They were much too clever with YouTube - the whole "posting to your G+ feed is the same as commenting on the video" thing was a bone-headed idea. They're different intents, they should be handled differently. Let G+ handle both of those actions, but don't call them the same action.
The nymwars thing was another one - when you try to sneak new social integration through the back-door like that, with a massive existing userbase? You can't be opinionated about it. You have to accept and work with all the existing workflow, and that includes allowing pseudonyms.
I liked the idea of a unified social layer... hell, unified anything in Google's sprawling service map. But G+ had too many mistakes, and broke too many promises over and over and over again.
Thank god. However, the G+ debacle was a wake up call to the fact that at any point the use of my good ol' email account and search page could become an absolutely complicated mess, and completely out of my control.
It was with such extreme frustration that I had deleted everything on my Google+ profile after trying for 30 minutes to get the G+ URL of either <my first name>, or my <last name>, <or may first + last name>, or <part of my first name>. I stopped using it, made everything private - what I couldn't remove (at that time).
All were available.
Close to 2, or at least more than 1 year later - all those URLs are still available.
But no, Google still thinks I must add a digit or two to that URL. I had forgotten that I have a G+ profile. I don't know anyone who uses this. I mean I don't know about others but why would I even want to use such a tool that is this effed up. While some might defend or even be kinder to G+ (well...) but I personally just can't accept a service this broken.
[+] [-] nogridbag|10 years ago|reply
>>"Google has been doing some rethinking" thanks I already read that
>>"#googleplusupdate #youtube " thank you that was valuable
>>[another summary of the article I just read]
This is also one of my major complaints with youtube. I find it hard enough just to follow a single youtube comment thread because:
1. Everyone appears to be speaking a dialect of english that is understandable seemingly to everyone but myself - some sort of strange mixture of 90's IRC speak with some klingon thrown in.
2. People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username.
John Smith: That was a great video
> Jane Smith: +Bubba I agree
me: "who the heck is Jane talking to?"
3. Then finally there're all of those G+ reshares:
John Smith: Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/asdf83289
> John Smith's friend: I enjoyed that video
</rant>
[+] [-] exodust|10 years ago|reply
Re-shares are not good reading. They are written by users for their followers, not for the people on the actual video page. As you said, they have zero value.
When I first noticed this way back when Google started publishing re-share comments under the videos, I would reply to those comments with remarks such as "I already knew that; yes I know what the video is; why are you repeating the video name"... and some people responded with "what are you talking about" because they didn't even know their re-share comments were being published on the video page. That's how broken the comments are.
[+] [-] paps|10 years ago|reply
[0] https://alientube.co/
[+] [-] city41|10 years ago|reply
Facebook has the same problem. Any reasonably popular feed, such as I f'ing love science has completely worthless comments, because 99% are them just people tagging their friends.
[+] [-] mcv|10 years ago|reply
You see Google+ interaction where you expect simple comments. I often see Youtube comments in Google+ threads because the thread happened to start with a video, and therefore automatically becomes a Youtube comment for barely literate Youtubers to spit their bile at. Or I see a G+er accidentally post a Youtube comment as a nonsensical G+ post.
Google tries to treat everything the same, but they need to recognize that different things are different things. I don't want my G+ stuff on Youtube, and I don't want Youtube stuff on G+. You don't want G+ reshares in the article's comment section.
I'm glad they finally seem to be coming to their senses. Would have been nice if that'd happened a few years earlier.
[+] [-] makeitsuckless|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|10 years ago|reply
To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.
[+] [-] gonehome|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drumdance|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tripzilch|10 years ago|reply
Tumblr has very much the same program regarding reshares. Although I'm not sure if Tumblr even wants to foster discussion on their site--people do it any way, of course, quoting each other, but most Tumblr themes make these kind of discussions look awkward and hard to follow. Nested quotes get thinner and thinner, until you have just one word per line, sticking halfway out the container.
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] marbletiles|10 years ago|reply
Kudos to them, but a lot of pain could have been avoided if they did all this listening back then, instead of waiting until their thing was clearly dead.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|10 years ago|reply
This is a good step, although the well has already been poisoned.
[+] [-] darklajid|10 years ago|reply
That said, the distinction between
is lost on me, I'm genuinely confused about the past and present state of these things. It feels like "G+ Accounts" are supposed to be the new "Google Accounts"? Like you could've had a Google Account without a Google Page or Google Profile or whatever that was called?I .. don't see what's changing. No reason to grab the pitchfork, but no reason for cheers or kudos either.
[+] [-] beambot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkozlows|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eevilspock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|10 years ago|reply
This isn't past-tense yet. Until this change, which isn't fully deployed yet (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.... , "in the coming weeks"), YouTube still requires a G+ account to comment or upload videos.
[+] [-] Trufa|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austenallred|10 years ago|reply
No company is immune to that cycle, not even Google.
[+] [-] uniformlyrandom|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon3_|10 years ago|reply
I hope other sites learn from this and not jam social networks down people's throats.
[+] [-] mythz|10 years ago|reply
Good example of Strong opinions, Weakly-held.
[+] [-] legohead|10 years ago|reply
Google messed up when it tried to make some master account with Google+. Maybe everything could be incorporated into one account, but the way they've done it is one of the most complicated and confusing systems I've seen in computer engineering, and that's pretty sad considering it's Google.
Take YouTube. When I go there now, I have my Google+ account, but I have my old YouTube account that has been consumed by the Google+ account, but yet it's still separate on YouTube?? Now when I use YouTube, I have to make sure it's my old YouTube account being selected instead of my Google+ one. Why is this so hard? What's going to happen to my old YouTube account when it gets owned by this new "Google Account"?
If you can't do this right, which is obviously an issue, then just keep everything separate. Stop Google-fying services that are separate.
[+] [-] marknutter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverbax88|10 years ago|reply
This is extremely simple, and Google has made this horribly invasive and it's flat out broken at this point.
[+] [-] taftster|10 years ago|reply
A "Google Account" is the same as your gmail account, which is likely the same as your Youtube account. This was true before Google+ came along.
[+] [-] higherpurpose|10 years ago|reply
The main reason (by far) Google unified them is so they they can more easily track everyone across multiple properties.
[+] [-] justincormack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|10 years ago|reply
It is a gmail account. Every time you are prompted to enter your google account, what do you enter? Yup, it was that simple.
[+] [-] amit_m|10 years ago|reply
"When we launched Google+, we were scared of Facebook winning over the internet and knew how powerful the network effect is. So we decided on a douchebag move - abuse all of our monopolistic powers and superior engineering in order to shove a Facebook killer down our users' throat at maximum speed, integrating it with each and every google service in existence (whether it made any sense or not) and killing social features that actually work in exchange to experimental G+ social features that might work eventually. According to our analytics, it didn't work, so... Never mind."
[+] [-] dimbirol|10 years ago|reply
But maybe they tried signing up but failed getting a custom G+-url. We see that you registered [email protected], but we can't let you use google.com/+google, why don't you use google.com/+google1425 and youtube.com/c/12868126nvesfz1761, which you can change to youtube.com/c/google6823_xw once you reach 500 subscribers.
[+] [-] dimbirol|10 years ago|reply
In order to create a consistent online profile, it's ideal to choose a name which is available on all major social networks.
Google is just not capable of offering a service like that:
You can't check in advance if a given g+ or youtube name is available. If you sign up for a gmail-account, the new account [email protected] doesn't mean you get youtube.com/newname or plus.google.com/+newname.
A custom youtube name oddly gets created at /c/username and not youtube.com/username and I somehow had to switch profiles (I think between my youtube account, for which I signed up using my gmail-account and my g+-profile which was created when signing up for gmail?!) while logged in into youtube to make changes which was extremely confusing.
Getting a custom g+url is even more difficult, as google adds some patronizing and suggests a name, which can not be edited.
Why is it not possible to register a consistent name accross all google products with 1 signup process: a gmail-account, a youtube username, a g+ account? Creating a new page or signing up at any other social media site maybe takes 5 minutes, the "Google experience" took 1 afternoon (!) with not the desired result.
[+] [-] realusername|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msandford|10 years ago|reply
"Don't be evil, but only after trying really hard to be so, and then grudgingly accepting that perhaps your users have alternatives that they might avail themselves of, and capitulate"
It's not as catchy, but perhaps a little more honest.
[+] [-] colbyh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
Before there were always discussions with answers, nowadays you see mainly "check out this video my friends on G+" kind of "trash" in the video comments.
[+] [-] danso|10 years ago|reply
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments....
It also mentions improvements to the ranking system "that reduces the visibility of junk comments. It’s working—the rate of dislikes on comments has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube."...Is there a whitepaper or engineering blog post about their technical approach to this?
[+] [-] try_sincerely|10 years ago|reply
Why can't they for once be honest and say something like: "We wanted to get on the social network train, it did not work out".
Just without these corporate lies about "connecting people"
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
Incidentally, Android phones work fine with no Google account. If you buy the phone new and unlocked, click "Later" when it asks for your Google account, and delete the "Google first time activation" app, they're fine.
[+] [-] helly|10 years ago|reply
It's a mystery to me, whom they are targeting.
Does anybody like their UI? If so, what device are you using? What do you think of FB vs G+?
I mainly use Firefox on the Desktop. And Facebook is somewhat ok. G+ feels completely out of sync.
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mangeletti|10 years ago|reply
What new value does Google+ add? Does anybody sign up for Google+ for reasons other than 1) Google Hangouts, or 2) accident? How is Google+ "quickly becoming a place where people engage..." and yet I don't know anybody who uses it? Am I hanging out with all the wrong people? I don't really actively engage with people on Facebook, but everybody I know uses Facebook in some capacity and people talk about it from time to time. I've never heard a single person in my life talk about Google+, other than, "I think you have to have a Google+ account to..." (e.g., Hangouts).
[+] [-] joesmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|10 years ago|reply
They were much too clever with YouTube - the whole "posting to your G+ feed is the same as commenting on the video" thing was a bone-headed idea. They're different intents, they should be handled differently. Let G+ handle both of those actions, but don't call them the same action.
The nymwars thing was another one - when you try to sneak new social integration through the back-door like that, with a massive existing userbase? You can't be opinionated about it. You have to accept and work with all the existing workflow, and that includes allowing pseudonyms.
I liked the idea of a unified social layer... hell, unified anything in Google's sprawling service map. But G+ had too many mistakes, and broke too many promises over and over and over again.
[+] [-] joeevans1000|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balladeer|10 years ago|reply
All were available.
Close to 2, or at least more than 1 year later - all those URLs are still available.
But no, Google still thinks I must add a digit or two to that URL. I had forgotten that I have a G+ profile. I don't know anyone who uses this. I mean I don't know about others but why would I even want to use such a tool that is this effed up. While some might defend or even be kinder to G+ (well...) but I personally just can't accept a service this broken.