Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.

Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.

Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.

In retrospect LiveJournal was pretty great as a social network of its time. It's too bad it got turned into some kind of Russian spam site.

it was russian twitter

and twitter is a spam site, so you're somewhat right

I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!

Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.

People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy decision at a per post level. (And not just average users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)

Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.

> It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy.

Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.

Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.

Another mistake is that they had a significant presence in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn’t bother to integrate and migrate the users in.

Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.

Orkut Büyükkökten's orkut.com might have been a semi-private project (Google, like any company, doesn't normally name its products after first names of its coders).

Also, as you say, it was populated by many Brazilians, an imbalance like that may discourage non-Brazilians from joining, so not sure if integrating them would have helped or hurt.

I was an Orkut user from the USA for a few years. The vibe was way nicer than Facebook. I think I was with them from 2007 to 2011 or so.

killedbygoogle.com says 2004 to 2014 so a decent chunk of the service's run.

The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.

I think that change happened well after G+ was dead

I just found this October 2011 post reporting about this change as it happened (4 months after G+'s launch in June 2011):

https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/

According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the reporting methodology seems very inconsistent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

"It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy."

The legendary Andy Hertzfeld played a role in shaping the design of Google Plus.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-design-andy-he...

Beside my friend who was gifted with invitation, there was nobody else from my circles (sic) and when asked they were replying with standard "why I should make yet another account". So for me it was a ghost town right from the start.

And frankly it was actually the first place where I truly noticed how big companies are extracting data from us; back then I felt really unpleasant when I tried to fill up profile.

I've got this old screenshot [1] and profile included: about me, "I know this stuff", current occupation, employment history, education path, place of residence with map, home and work addresses, relationship status and what kind of partner you are looking for, gender, other names - maiden name, alternative spelling, nickname, visibility in search results and a section for links to other websites. This may be seen as not much today but back then even facebook wasn't that "curious" - that was about to change.

I also tried to utilize Google Wave for our university group to keep us informed etc., but people wanted just "plain old" emails with attachments.

[1] - https://ibb.co/SDDGG3PJ

G+ died because it was clown colored google product, not a communal space for people. It was technology without any aesthetic that made you want to be there.

Myspace was hilarious because it was such a mess. The people owned it, hacked the css. Every profile page was a messy real person.

The migration of YT accounts to G+ is how most of the critical mass learned there was G+. It took years to recover nicknames.

IMO, their biggest problem was that they made a product that was terminally uncool.

Google Wave worked fine for me, as I recall. I remember being really impressed on one level, but I also couldn't figure out what to actually use it for.

A couple weeks ago, I thought about diving back into demos to reacquaint myself with it. It's possible that it was ahead of its time. Or maybe it was a solution in search of a problem.

Downvoters surely work for, or are asscolytes of $GOOG, heh. More slaves they!

G+ copied some features and design work the open source federated social media, particularly Diaspora. So yeah, a lot of the features were developed in context of privacy protections.

yeah they made a lot of mistakes, the biggest one was not iterating on making it a good product. they just dumped it into the world, mostly formed and did nothing with it.

it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with it

forcing everyone to use something that still had teething issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to integrate youtube they should have started with making G+ popular so people would actually want that, and yeah real names so dumb.

blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids went to school and they suddenly realised full name is actually too much information

Discovery was bad.

I was the one to push G+ and Gwave on my friends and it did not take at all.

I remember that the (initial) invite-only aspect played out in the worst way. Some FOMO angle works, but it ended up just ... not working, and who joins a social media wastleland?

+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)

It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to leverage some of the existing social networking going on on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and making the actual posts/comments into first class global content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your content to its intended audience.

(See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)

Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels like one of these things where mediocre people get control over something which was initially made by people who actually know what they're doing

> Reddit is fucking miserable

Reddit is the town bar, the popular one.

Some people love the town bar! :)

Some people hate the town bar! :(

Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level. When you start to get the number of users sites like Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have that on Reddit.

I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'

If you look at their "all accounts" it's over 650,000,000.

Around 250,000,000 is monthly user usage, which would be for one or more accounts.

And if course, like every site, a percentage that keep the thing going (around 35,000,000 daily logins).

It's one of the top sites on the internet and has been for a very long time.

I tried to start using Reddit. None of my friends had ever heard of it or wanted to use it, and I soon lost interest in it.

From my little experience of using it, it seems that its main audience is the mentally retarded or just children under 11 years old.

The same questions are asked all the time. It wasn't difficult for me to find a search on the site for why they don't use it?

There is a lot of nonsense in the comments/answers, which they state with full confidence.

And there was also a feeling that there are rarely disagreements in discussions, even if there are minor differences, everyone adheres to a single line, often related to the topic/name of the subreddit.

I found several people creating content that I was interested in, but some of the posts on the page were hidden and it was easier to follow them on YouTube or blogs.

In general, searching for valuable posts or comments is like digging through manure to find gold.

And even if you find a clever idea or a good technical hint, it was often easier to find it just by reading the documentation. It's the same with interesting posts. If it's something worthwhile, then it will be on twitter, blog, YouTube, social networks or in some forums.

I'm not talking about advertising every second post, or even among the comments. Disabling ad blocking was a mistake.

> it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'

A very appropriate definition. It's not even interesting to discuss something on Reddit. If your opinion or thought coincides with the ideology of the subreddit, then you will have a lot of likes. If it don't match, you get dislikes, insults, or worse, no response.

In general, I did not find any benefit for myself on Reddit and I am unlikely to return there, it is a waste of energy and effort.

Reddit is a bunch of bar districts in a large city. You can find any sort of bar you want. Some of the bars you'll love. Some of them you'll hate. Some of them will make you say "what the hell is any of this?"

It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how many subreddits are the results of splits from an older subreddit.

You can find any sort of bar you want, but all of them are owned by the same shady company which waters down the drinks, are involved in secret backroom deals which sometimes results in things like selling your personal info or in bars being closed without notice. They also refuse to give the bouncers the training and resources they need which leaves many bars full of jerks who shouldn't have made it inside in the first place, while in other bars you can find yourself thrown out for no reason at all.

It's kind of like an American grocery store where you have shelf after shelf filled with different brand names and products in all kinds of colors and flavors, but they're all owned by one of three corporations so it really doesn't matter which product you buy, you're still supporting the same assholes who will gladly poison you if it'll increase their profits by a fraction of a cent, so naturally most of your choice comes down to the flavor of the poison.

No. I'm very specifically saying (contrary to your implication) that it's the management of the bar which is the problem

HN loves to do this. "Platforms are mirrors held up to society". No, not always. Sometimes there really is unnecessary executive top-down control

(btw this is trivial to bypass; actual segregated alt accounts remain the only thing you should rely on if you need compartmented identities/aspects)

One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.

Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.

Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.

My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.

I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.

Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.

This is my impression as well. From what I've seen, many Gen Z people only loosely even think in terms of things like "files". They are used to integrations where everything just lives on some website or in a Google app and the way you locate things is by searching.

I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that very few students had any exposure to real computers. It was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you mention—not knowing what a file is—really is the state of things. We now explicitly talk about files in our intro programming courses, first as a general idea in CS1, and then we dig into (some of) the representations in CS2.

Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.

I'm also noticing another trend with my 16yr old daughter and her friends. They are craving old school offline experiences. They have all dragged out the parents and relatives old music collections, cruising second hand shops for old CDs etc. when they visit others houses they are checking out each other's household book and music collections.

She recently got a cheap digital camera with no screen and just a shutter button and and plain old viewfinder. The idea is that like the old days you don't know what you took a photo of until (a bit like getting the film developed) you plug the SD card into a computer and have a look.

I think she'd get a kick out of ripping CDs and ditching Spotify. I can teach her all about files and filesystems then haha.

My 19yr old son doesn't follow the same old school stuff, but he kinda shunned social media from the beginning.

That's cool to hear. I fear it's not the main trend, but it's comforting somewhat.

We still need a lot of plug and Play with home servers.

In theory, AI should be good at helping building interfaces between cloud backups and home server apps. Because AI should be good at apis.

In theory

I’d like a turnkey k3s and a 10” rack designed for consumers. Set up to host your Minecraft server, store your media, and be incrementally upgradeable.

Gamers are the ones building PCs by hand. They have the skills, it’s a matter of motivation.

Building PCs by hand nowadays is quite trivial. You don't need to set bunch of jumpers on the motherboard correctly, manually assign IRQs, etc. The peak "complexity" modern gamers deal with is correctly overclocking their gear without frying it or making the system unstable (which is mostly done in some nice GUI according to a youtube tutorial anyway).

The software and security aspects of running a server are far more consequential and complex.

"dad jeans" ?

Outdated looking jeans that are a light-ish wash with an unflattering cut more designed for comfort and price rather than style or for rugged work.

Though the term has recently been adopted by a trend in women’s jeans that don’t really resemble their namesake.

The connotation being that they’re outdated, uncool, and dorky.

Yeah, that trend came up in search, hence my confusion. Thanks.

I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty minecraft server.

I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

> I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.

Immich feels too heavy for my needs, so I wrote a single executable server that turns my photo directories into a photo gallery (https://github.com/yhling/go-web-image-gallery)

Photo ingestion is via regular samba uploads from my phone.

You might be shocked. Immich is amazing.

I'm working on it! I have a little NUC that I'm learning Linux (Is that the proper term?) on. I plan to self host a few services for myself and host family photos on it someday.

I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at the moment :>

Too bad all of the RAM and NAND flash are going to be unaffordable for the next few years at least.

Once you include internet latency hard drive latency isn’t that much worse. It won’t help but it won’t stop it.

Hard disk drive prices are also soaring. Looking up a random WD drive: up 70% since July, a Seagate drive, up 50%

For $125, which is also about the price of one year of cloud storage, you can get a hard drive big enough to store half a million photos and also back up a million photos. It probably won't ever go over $200.

And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere between free and another hundred.

Sure, but then you're putting all your eggs in one basket (hard drive). If you really want to divest yourself of the cloud then you need to set things up in a redundant and fault-tolerant fashion. And at that point the outlay is much more than 'just a hard drive'.

Did you skip the "back a million photos" part? That's at least 3 copies of every file, spread across your group. If you want maximum safety you can add a local backup too, which isn't much more money. You don't need to spend anything on fault tolerance. Your files should already be on multiple servers, but also if it goes down for a few days that isn't a big deal.

That was already covered in my top level comment though. Geographic redundancy not local mirroring.

Yes, you need two hard drives. If you’re really paranoid, use three.

I’ve been thinking about setting up a family domain and just hosting my family’s pictures to it as a way to share internally. But the risk exposure of running anything online is just so bad now, it feels risky and a pain in the ass to both give family access to see and post but also seal it off from spammers and scammers.

The way in which any open text box on the internet is guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and makes casual and marginally technical users trying their own thing much higher stakes and annoying.

If you setup a server at home, you can expose it via a cloudflare tunnel, meanwhile it's behind your firewall + NAT. This will obfuscate the server IP a bit. It allows allows you to use very simple cloudflare Zero Trust rules to only allow people to access your server/website from people with a user account on that domain. (Or geographical restrictions, etc, etc)

I was thinking about something similar. ( Family photo sharing) The problem is: family is so used to Instagram and co, that they won't use it.

Apple has photo sharing where you can share photos privately.

Agreed, Apple shared albums seems to be the default. It’s not amazing, but your photos and contacts are already there, no new network required.

Yeah why put anything on social media. Your content is just a means to put ads alongside, and then trained to death by their AI.