The reason is that the page design assumes its on a mobile phone which its somewhat unique tall portrait orientation. And sure enough, looking at the page on my phone it looks a bit flat but it works well.

So now we are in a place in the web where browser users get the crappy UX experience because someone spent all their time focused on the other community and really didn't bother to make their pages responsive to both.

the main index page wraps nicely to multiple columns when you're on a larger screen.

The latter results in a sort of 'tweetlike' appearance for a lot of G+ posts as they are quite short, the former makes it more 'newspaper' style and introduces the question of how you move from the bottom left to the top right. If you do it with the same posting it makes scrolling challenging, if you do it with multiple postings it makes the user scroll up and down to see the top and bottom.

Then again, there is a really useful layout that folks have been using forever where you put summaries on the left and content expands in boxes on the right. But then it looks just like gmail or something, except that is exactly what it is "group email". Gooogle plus seems confused about what it is, is it twitter ? is it facebook? is it usenet? is it email? Fix its multiple personality disorder and the design will fall out of that naturally.

On the main stream, you have multiple columns of data. On a single post, what should be to either side?

Probably nothing.

I would rather have to scroll down on an article that I can actually read, rather than fit the article on my screen but be unable to read it well.

Wide text only really works for very short text of a few lines. Long text comments on HN tend to suck pretty badly with wide browser windows.

1. Single-pane designs. Multiple columns, especially online, for main content text, is too hard to follow. In a cards-type presentation (e.g., G+) a 2-column display somewhat works, but 3 columns to me simply becomes noise. I think a multi-column (newspaper-like) display might work if you had explicit height alignments, see a site like http://freshnews.org, very old-school, but which essentially has a 3-column grid, and compare with, say, the NYTimes desktop layout. Note that new column heights aren't simply random, but tend to be lined up across the page, or at least a section of it.

2. A flexible main-body text width, but maximising at about 35-45 em. Look up "Edward Morbius's motherfucking web page" on CodePen.io for my interpretation of a popular meme, and pretty much how I style my own content. It's a very minimal ruleset. Pocket and Readability are good models.

3. A paginated, two-page-up mode, for desktop / widescreen mode. See many eBook readers or the Internet Archive's Bookreader in 2-up mode. This gives focus on a single page at a time, but the ability to reference across two pages. I use a tablet in portrait (1-up) mode a lot, and prefer being able to reference back and forth across two pages. A fixed pagination also feeds my spatial memory for where something was on a page. Pocket has a paginated mode, but it's dynamic, changing to wherever you've scrolled a page. I dislike that.

4. Except for the very narrowest display, at least a minimum margin on sides. I'll usually set 1-2em for even a small-factor mobile device, and prefer 4-5em for most widths. As text body reaches 45em, center the main body. Text that runs flush to the screen edge, or is sharply asymmetric on the page, is quite annoying.

5. Use those margins. I've written a sidenote style which puts annotations in the margin, with a dynamic repositioning for narrower widths (or rather the inverse, using Mobile First design). I also push illustrations / images into the right margin to allow text to wrap, but still leave a comfortable width, around inline images.

My problem with a "summaries on the side" display (sidebar) is that the summaries are so often entirely gratuitous and inappropriate. Single-column is far calmer. I move sidebars to headers and footers (through my own site-specific CSS rewrites), or simply disable them entirely.

True story: I'm completely capable of narrowing my browser window if I want narrower text. The site I'm reading doesn't actually need to do that for me!

The context of this conversation is how a product should have been done. The devs that make that product want people to use it.

You're suggesting that they ignore part of that user base, based on a claim that people shouldn't browse the internet however is most convenient for them. E.g. by using a computer they already have instead of a tablet they might not. All parts of that reasoning are ridiculous.

That's how I did it back in the 90s and early 2000s. I'm not certain when I was forced to start widescreening my browser, but I think it was roughly around the time I got a widescreen (ironically enough, I got more horizontal space and was forced to waste it immediately).

I'm not bitter …

I know Firefox was terribly slow there (like it is with many script-driven websites), but I never dug into why.

There's 3 separate engines all with different tradeoffs.

Have you used Firefox in the past couple of years?

Even if it were slow (which it isn't), it's not doing surveillance for money. If you really want a Chromium-based browser, you could always use Vivaldi or Opera or take your pick of many others.

Glacially slow.

And the recent buzz about a concurrent engine shows how much slower. When you have 300%+ headroom just by uncoupling your execution strategy from an unnecessary global lock no one else has, you are not "speeding up". You are "catching up."

Benchmarks suggest there isn't much in it....

http://hothardware.com/reviews/web-browser-performance-compa...

Firefox is sluggish on every machine, and consistently feels like the slower paint. I understand the synthetic benchmarks are not so distant, but we don't interact with browsers at the level of Sunspider benchmarks. We interact at the level of full dom renders to screen, first clicks available, scrolling and repainting performance, tab open and close time, and startup time.

Firefox has never been a positive experience for me on those on anything but the very oldest of Linux boxes, and quite frankly I've written off the entire X11/Linux desktop environment as a tire fire with people trapped inside.

Also, note the 12 second time is what the Google+ team clocked as average. Yours may have been faster. Others, were even slower.

1. Allow viewers to download my photos and videos shared on Google+

2. Don't feature my publicly shared Google+ photos as background images on Google products and services

Slider 1 is "on" for yes, slider 2 is "off" for yes. Just rephrase the second statement to a positive from a negative and both sliders will be "agree" to the left and "Disagree" to the right.

Then expand one of the expander arrows in the Notifications section. The first line " Occasional updates about Google+ activity and friend suggestions" isn't a question at all, so I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or not. Most of the other statements start with "Show...", but this one is just a blank statement. No consistency at all. With Posts expanded, the top slider button looks like it will be an 'everything on' or everything off' button, but it isn't. So it seems to not have a relationship to the any of the expandable subcategories below it. The "People" expando/expander has only a single button, so no need to expand it all all, then. And so on.

Google do interaction design like an engineer with an ego.

Oh definitely and it seems they've taken over the wheel [1] and went into rage mode with Material design.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho...

Google interaction design is more scam artist than engineer.

It's quite possible there's not that many people working on it now.

You don't need someone with post-doc CS expertise to do mundane, basic coding, and someone that advanced wouldn't want to work on the unpopular, "boring" tasks anyway.

I'm generally in favor of a wider column because then the in-line images are bigger. And in either case, I don't see why the column width shouldn't be adjustable.

Of course, since I stopped using G+ years ago, I have no reason to care....

Perhaps there's a correlation to my preference to G+'s layout, but one of the first things I did when I signed back up for FB was make a userscript to remove all that noise. My FB now looks like http://i.imgur.com/Vd6e6sh.png

I think it looks so much better single-column, personally (though I use the 3-column layout on G+).

I'm not sure why they chose such a small default width for desktop.

IMHO, the big chance anyone had to disrupt FB was a paradigm shift away from social news feeds. That paradigm shift arrived with photo sharing and messaging on mobile, where increasingly people were just sharing pictures and text messages privately. However, Zuckerberg saw that one coming and acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to head off any disruption.

That shouldn't stop people from trying to innovate. But we should not regard being smaller than the leader as a failure. I use G+, Twitter, and FB, but I have the best conversations on G+. Twitter discussions are an exercise in frustration, and I find the signal/noise on FB to be worse.

There's a benefit sometimes to having a smaller audience.

1. Repeated self-sabotage. On multiple fronts, G+ actively dissuaded large, initially positive, early-adoptor groups.

2. Founding cohort. Googlers were OK, as were the early techies. Google's position as the world's leading ad agency meant that marketing types, particularly the sub-breed known as SEO, were a large initial cohort. Until users learned to block them on site, this was a net negative.

3. Fighting users' interests. There were several use-cases, but one that many sought was a long-form content posting space. Google+ supports this in some ways (posts can be quite long), but offered far too little by way of preview. One of my few heeded suggestions: to insert a word count on post previews.

4. Forced mergers of unrelated products. I really don't want random people off the Web popuulating my email contacts, or writing to my calendar, or tracking my YouTube views. I and I don't want my personal and private online activities broadcast to co-workers, family, friends, and others. I don't want to have G+ nags following me across all other Google properties, and actively sought out alternatives to Search, Maps, and other tools simply to no have a Persistent Red Dot appear everywhere I went.

Abysmal search (no search when the product was first launched), abysmal filtering, abysmal response to privacy, abysmal record of unilaterally joining up multiple independent accounts against users' express wishes. Abysmal experience in locking people out of all of their Google services for perceived misdeeds on a single one. This was a massive shitshow from start to finish.

That have been dozens of other networks launched besides G+, none of them have garnered significant traction. Only mobile chat products that utilize phone numbers and contacts to build a network have really made a dent.

The vast majority of users of G+ never experienced blocking, didn't care about nymwars, etc. These are edge-user complaints. It causes distress in early adopters and the technorati but is meaningless to most people.

If you look at WhatsApp and Instagram, it turns out the majority of Facebook's users didn't care about 90% of their features. They just want to share photos and sent short messages.

My point is, those who are deeply about these things focus on edge case features that make a ton of difference to them, but are invisible to most people. Hell, I've rarely used Facebook search to search for anything other than a Contact. I suspect most people don't use the Search feature much, or lists, or groups, and all of the other dials and knobs.

Much of the world's communications by average people now runs on WhatsApp, iMessenger, WeChat, LINE, etc, because the use case for most people is not to be a public persona with a subscriber base, to conduct arguments and discussions with them.

Community is what matters, and founding cohort is hugely significant. Group personality is established early, and can often veer off in unexpected (and frequently unwanted) directions. I've just mentioned my recent Imzy experiences, an interesting concept in several ways, but with some exceptionally poor dynamics interacting with a quite volatile userbase (at least in part).

Google's Circles were a fuckup from the start, and that was apparent from the first "you're holding it wrong" arguments and flamewars coming both from those following people and those castigating their followers. Distribution, topic, notification, and source are all different concepts, Google+ tried squishing them into a single conceptual model. That model didn't fit reality. And it wasn't reality that broke as a consequence. I think it's Larry Wall who's observed that you cannot simplify a complex state simply by ignoring its complexity. That complxity will out, and it's going to be ugly.

You're probably right about the vast majority of G+ users not caring about blocking and nymwars, because the vast majority of users never publicly posted to the site. Only about 6% of users have every written a public post, something I and Stone Temple Consulting independently verified by sampling actual profiles (I ran 50k, STC 500k, see STC's "Hard Numbers" blog post for a solid breakdown).

On the other hand, if you did use G+ heavily, blocking matters a hell of a lot, because otherwise you've got a bunch of annoying fucks in your face, and Nymwars was critical to the participation of many, quite a few of whom are what made G+ interesting, to the small extent that it actually is. Not offering those features may not have direct effects, but it does have indirect effects, often profound.

In the Imzy instance, the lack of blocking (which I wanted to use), and the presence of pervasive anonymous posting (which interests me little -- a few nyms are largely sufficient, though I might occasionally use a throwaway) had a tremendous impact on the tenor of discussion. Such that I quite simply feel it would be a major risk to me to continue to use the site. Something I quite rarely feel. I certainly won't be inviting others there. This despite some nice technical features.

I agree, actually, that most conversation is small-scale. We're effectively creating an impromptu, softly-defined conversation space here, for a one-on-one discussion. David Weinberger, commenting on Reddit a year or so back, quipped "Conversation doesn't scale very well." For the types of discussions I'm most interested in, a group of 6 to 60 seems pretty good, maybe a few more than that in a good crowd with solid direction from the top. My Imzy experience is contrasted directly with dang's moderation here on HN -- one of those "antisocial techie spaces", which frankly achieves vastly better results than the "kinder, gentler Reddit" Imzy claims it wants to be.

Where I'll disagree with you strongly is that the people who focus on edge cases are invisible. They may not be apparent, but their presence or absence is quite tangible.

G+ offered the promise of being Usenet 3.0, and had (and still has) a number of first-generation Usnetters, several of whom I follow. Peter da Silva (who created Usenet 2.0), Karl Aurbach (one of the very first Arpanet team), Lauren Weinstein, and others. But quite a few people I'd really hoped would participate, and followed with anticipation, opted out. Pretty much the whole Boing Boing crew, notably Cory Doctorow, though Xeni Jardin posted for a while. Jonathan Zittrain. Lawrence Lessig, who posted for a bit then left. Etc.

Ello saw a similar initial groundrush with Quinn Norton, Merideth L. Patterson, Clay Shirky, and Paul Mason (the journalist) active early. Even jwz showed up -- to tell us that we'd all discover the importance of the social graph soon enough. There's a small little group there, and I enjoy the interactions, which are also refreshingly healthy. But it's not what I'd hoped for. Great place for art and poetry, and there are some local heros -- Ksenia Anske, if you like Russian-American authors, and Trenton Lee Tiemeyer, a gifted poet. I really like their content.

But critical mass on diverse topics, not.

I've looked into where that does happen, and the answers, in general:

* Wordpress. Far and away the winner. Long-form, complex content favours blogs. Whodathunkit. The problems though are engagement and discovery, issues that SocMed platforms address.

* Reddit. Large and very high s/n, by my measure. Not quite the quality of blogs in terms of posts (though that can happen), but a far richer conversation.

* Metafilter. Tiny by Internet standards, but an astounding s/n.

* Facebook. Sheer mass has its advantages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

HN also does well, though within a somewhat limited scope. The reasons have little to do with the technical capabilities, and may have a great deal to do with lacking features. The resulting conversational level is high though.

twitter is indeed bad for conversations, but it is excellent to get a feed of what's what, as long as you are following the right people. i am pretty selective in who i follow and it leads to a pretty high quality feed, at least in my opinion.

also, where else are you going to get one of your idols (fumito ueda) to like a tweet/post of yours? haha.

social network people discovery shouldn't be work, twitter is. have one but don't really use it anymore for the same reason. it's just exhausting constantly curating your feed

Perhaps if Ballmer had stopped trying to make OS licensing a profit center on mobile, history would have been different.

And there's plenty of open source options out there now too, but it requires people step away from the coddled embrace of the existing monopolist.

Arguing for more Android forks is really a counter to your complaints about security issues, since it will result in even more fragmented updating schedules, given carrier control. It also contradicts your usual pimping of Windows Phone, complaining about Google's "monopoly" on Android, but supporting a monopolist (Microsoft) who won't even open source their OS.

This here wasn't persay an argument for more Android forks. As I said, Android is buggy and insecure. I'd rather many of the other open source options like Tizen or Ubuntu Touch get a chance to thrive. My view on Android itself is simple: As long as Google is incapable of updating it's own software, it's a joke. A literal joke.

One could easily claim my bias is obvious, given my employer, but outside that, there are simply facts that can be independently measured and verified by anyone by simply measuring amount of code, projects, shipped as open source by each company.

While Microsoft should absolutely be commended for their turn around in recent times given their new CEO, the fact reminds, Google not only continues to ship more open source projects every year, but has actually been more open, not less, recently. And that doesn't even count the huge number of external commits that Googlers make to other open source projects that are not owned by Google. To say that Microsoft getting better than Google at openness is completely lacking in evidence, and only by bias and political spin can it be seen otherwise.

As of right now, Google open source enables IHVs to make products and take them to market, saving enormous development costs, by forking Android or parts of it, or forking Chromium. Or taking V8 (as nodejs did) to spawn an entire development ecosystem. There's a thriving industry of startups and development ecosystem that exists because of these contributions. Right now, I can't go make say, a new wearable, IoT device, phone, or TV, and bootstrap it quickly by taking parts of Windows, but you can see tons of Kickstarter projects that do that with Google code, without involving any formal arrangement with Google, i.e. "permissionless" development.

When cheap devices in India or China enable the worlds poor to get online by using Microsoft source, then maybe your statements can hold water.

Look at how fast the new + loads, and open up the sources tab in your browser and look at how the JS is split. The way Closure Compiler is slicing up the app into tons of tiny individually loadable, optimized and minified chunks is very awesome. Google+ photos on the Web works the same way.

Check out his G+ posts to see all the work the G+ team has been doing.

https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski

I'm more wondering if there's some goal they're all working towards... what's their mission as a team? What's the morale like? Is there a lot of pressure on them to perform better?

You say: "everything about google+ seems forced."

I say: less forced than twitter, on g+ I can write my post just the way I want anf share with just the people I want.

Less forced than facebook: on g+ I can (and I do have) multiple personas, keeping my friends away from being bothered by my taste in music, future employers from being bothered by what I do on my spare time etc. Hint: nothing illegal, I would not trust it to protect me against a police investigation, but for the majority of us (I hope) we don't need that.

Of course I'm also a paranoid who wouldn't use any social media remotely tied to real life anyway.

Ads funds everything else that Google does. That is where the top engineers are working.

From the outside looking in it looks to me like Google+ is going to be the hub in which users can interact with all of Google's properties that have a mechanism to work with and collaborate with other, public users. They likely still have millions of users.

In comparison to Facebook sure it's a massive failure. But I'm of the opinion that isn't an accurate nor useful comparison.

It actually surpassed Twitter (and MySpace) pretty quickly after launch in terms of DAUs and MAUs, and remained the #2 network (behind FB) for as long as they released stats for it. I wouldn't be surprised if it still were #2 -- but they haven't released updated MAU counts* for a year or two.

[1] https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b597d8be03e46b4bd142d9...

[2] https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-378c3027e991abd6b078dc...

[3] https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-28c2654acfc9b8b950de17...

Also, since everyone always asks: their MAU counts separated "users" from "people posting in the G+ stream" -- the numbers above are for the latter.

Yes, but we're talking maybe about .5% of all Google accounts actively use Google+... what's their goal at this point? 1%? is it a "if we build it, eventually they might come" scenario?

If they're being at all realistic then I think that idea has to be out the window at this point.

Not sure what their ultimate goal is. Since it's Google, even if millions of people are using it I fully expect them to just kill it eventually. I mean they pulled Photos out of Google+, maybe they'll pull out the communities stuff they've been working on and just axe the whole thing.

- decouple things from the g+ name since a vocal minority is still throwing a tantrum everytime the name is mentioned.

- g+ identity continues like before only they just call it "your account", not "your google+ account"

- why was photos, maps etc so heavily tied into g+ in the first place? I think it is safe to say now that that portal-like idea was a big nistake in the first place.

Until Gmail existed, there was no reason for the typical user to log in to Google at all. Webmasters and advertisers and a few other categories, yes, but search was just Generic, Unauthenticated Search.

Gmail changed that. Now the general public had a reason to create a Google acccount. And to have their online Google activity accountable to that.

I immediately resisted any temptation to create a personal Gmail account. I may have had several through corporate email (and yes, it was technically far superior to, say, Microsoft Exchange). But man did the idea of mapping my random search activity to my name (and my employer, and my paycheck) not sit well.

Any mandated centralised ID across Google services, without the ability to disown or repudiate services, is simply wrong.

From googles and the uncaring users perspective it makes perfect sense though: less hassle for everyone.

The fact though that I cannot specifically associate or dissociate specific products across IDs is quite problematic. I've got a "Things I Don't Have" post somewhere ... Here we go:

"Google Shit I Don't Have"

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/y0ss_vplsmhsagqvf23fiq

The inability to, once, in once place, for all time, say "no, this shit isn't OK with me" on Google services doesn't sit well with me. It's why my public and personal use of the company's services are so widely separated, and largely minimised.

Using Google mostly to criticise Google has ... a pleasing symmetry.

Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!", and turned into... whatever it is they are doing today.

They could have been the Facebook that is not Facebook, or in Randall Munroe's words, "all I really wanted"[1]. Too bad.

[1] https://www.xkcd.com/918/

The thing is, they had a chance to capture the market of early adopters, but they've lost it in the nymwars.

And I know a lot of people try to come up with all sorts of reasons for why Google+ didn't stand a chance against Facebook, ranging from UI to availability of games and the network effect, but no, Google+ appeared at a moment in time when people where nervous about their online privacy and getting tired of Facebook and Google had one chance and totally blew it with their real name policy.

But then it got worse, they forced YouTube users to migrate to a Google+ account and thus adopt the real name policy. I mean YouTube, their biggest online community. It has been a total clusterfuck and guess what, YouTube comments are still shitty, even with real names, because many people are in essence jerks and a real name policy isn't going to change that. I sometimes wonder if they were clueless about this, or knew it and did it anyway for advertising value.

But lets rewind a little and remember that they killed Google Reader because of Google+. I'll never forget them for Google Reader, I'll never trust their free offerings again.

If anything, their current attitude of backtracking from their Google+ push users-be-damned has been nothing but healthy.

But maybe they could have been. Unfortunately, their desire not to be second place meant they did all sorts of user unfriendly things in order to rope users in to using the system and boost numbers.

Abusing users' trust might work great for short term numbers, but it's bad for the long term.

But no, Youtube still has second-rate commenting.

Even a voting/ranking system closer to Reddit would be better.

But that wouldn't be sticking to their guns; from their very beginning, Google+ was overtly described as an identity service and social layer tying together Google's consumer services, with the Facebook-like social interface just one feature. (If anything, they've gone further in the direction you seem to prefer of designating G+ as a social network rather than "sticking to their guns", by taking everything that's not the Facebook-like social interface and ripping the G+ branding off of it.)

> Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!"

Actually, I think what they decided is that either Facebook wasn't the existential threat to Google that motivated what was described at the time as a "bet the company" approach, or that at least, if it wasn't, that it was so more because of the cluster of services that it might expand into and which Google was better prepared to compete directly with (and often be ahead of), and not a commonly-branded suite centered around a social feed app. So both the G+ social feed app and the G+ branding applied to a bunch of other things became a lot less important in Google's strategy.

Unfortunately, "a good social network" is somewhat at odds with "maximizing ad-impressions", a problem which neither Facebook nor Google are immune to.

P.S.: What I mean is that "John Doe" and "John Doe, SDE2" and "JD12345, online gamer" should have no automatic public links between them.

People don't merely post/like things with a different audience, they interact as a different mask. Your fellow gamers shouldn't have your work-identity, coworkers shouldn't have your close-friends identity, etc.

Unfortunately it is named pages or something so it sounds like something else.

Anyway, these days I just use Google+ to keep contact with a group of friends and follow Linus rants, but the circles mechanic is so muddled that I wouldn't really recommend anyone to actually use it if they want airtight separation.

Thanks for helping out here. Actually I can switch without using multiple accounts, explanation here: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/30701/how-to-swit...

I just verified it works by switching from my personal profile to my moonlight consulting company "page" that is just another profile of me and I can post, follow and add comments from it just like my main, personal profile. There is also a third, non-commercial "page" that I sometimes use (because I have a embarrassingly good taste in music : ).

> but the circles mechanic is so muddled that I wouldn't really recommend anyone to actually use it if they want airtight separation.

If I undersstand it correctly I should post family photos to a circle (since I decides who belong in what circle).

Technical stuff I post into one collection or another so people can decide for themselves if they just want to see my post on vegetables, the one on IT or both.

And stuff that needs airtight separation I only share with /dev/null ;-)

You still don't transparently switch modes in different spaces, but you can supply that.

The "change my ID by space" model, along with a non-advertising revenue plan, is Imzy. Actually, they take this one step further, in that you can opt to be anonymous (with a freshly-created, random username) in any given post (if allowed within the community). That and some other features are interesting.

The actual experience leaves a great deal to be desired, in my experience. On-demand anonymity like that does lead to a huge potential for abuse, and requires very active moderation. I found myself the subject of unceasing attacks in a thread in which the Imzy CEO and community manager were each prresent, and where the latter denied that there was a problem. One of the community leads finally came in and locked the thread -- a mail glitch had dumped all alerts to her spam folder, and activity in that profile is usually far less than what had appeared (the post is over 60% of all comments to date, over the past several months).

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...

Many great ideas get crushed under the weight of mediocrity and terrible people abusing it.

At the end of the day this was an executive's pet project in response to what he considered an existential crisis to Googles future. While certainly motivating, that doesn't result in focused or quality services.

A "Facebook that's not Facebook" run by Duckduckgo or EFF or something like that would be useful. Run by another privacy destroying advertising company it's not very helpful, IMO.

Google had the "buzz" fail. For Facebook that seemed to be modus operandi for a while: silently make everything public as long as users didn't complain loudly enough.

And Facebook still do from time to time: just look at how they are now exploiting Whatsapp users, something I think they promised not to do when they bought it.

No idea, if it's actually true, but it seems about right, especially also with the name and that Google replaced the plus-operator in Google searches to search through Google+.

https://imagebin.ca/v/2tORL2z4J7LW

Seems like an awful waste of space.

Is everybody at Google using vintage Apple Macintosh Portrait Display?

http://www.apple-forever.com/pix_big/34.jpg

Of course, if you logged on, you'd also see your own profile pic. This is useful if you've forgotten who you are.

http://i.imgur.com/dgBAaTK.jpg

I 100% recommend switching over to 3 columns; not nearly the space-waster. The setting's in https://plus.google.com/settings, ctrl+f "Restrict stream to single column layout on all screen sizes" (the design is especially bad on that page).

The setting you mention is only used in streams (e.g. a community, your home stream, etc). Your screenshot shows your stream, not the OP link.

I am writing some feedback hoping that some googler will read this and improve something..

* The search features suggests a lot of rubbish even before i started searching

* the whole interface is still slow

* When I click on "communities" on the left panel, i get redirected to the community suggestion page, while I expected to see the communities of which i am part. Also, the suggestion are completely messed up.

* when i click on "communities" and am brought to the suggestion page, clicking on the "member" link (that i guess, should show me the communities i am part of) does nothing at all.

* it is in general very very hard to understand what post comes from where, and this makes it very hard to use google plus more than the usual "oh crap i opened it again, how do i close it?"

* Opon a click to write a post, an overlay with a popup window is opened instear of just letting me write. The popup opening is slow as the other stuff.

* did i mention the whole thing is slow ?

* The default option for sharing is "Public" (oh hell no)

* Otherwise you can "add to a collection" (and wtf is a collection in google plus terms now?)

* in order to select a community or a circle (circles should be the hot stuff of Google+, you have to make two more steps ("See more", scroll).

Add to collection means "add to collection". Practical example: I share my uncles interest in clean energy solutions but not his taste in music. Unlike twitter, on g+ I can easily follow his collection about clean energy without seing everything he posts.

I thought for sure you were joking - but no. That is actual functionality. A complete pointless and slow animation that makes posting a quick thought take longer than it should was actually considered a good UI/UX by the G+ team...

When G+ originally came out I wanted to like it because the design itself wasn't too bad and I liked the concept of Circles (something other social sites lacked at the time, or were clunky to use). But everything else about G+ was just...bad. Including actually trying to use Circles.

They gave it a facelift but it looks like everything under the hood is still bad...

Material Design really annoys me. Dingy grey backgrounds, unnecessary boxes and shadows, and goofy animation that takes us bad to the bad days of Flash sites.

https://material.google.com/

The problem is, no one at Google is using them in an attractive way.

I hope that at some point in the future someone has a design epiphany centered around embracing information density.

If everything is just kind of flat and grey, there's less noise, and it's easier to write A/B tests that produce meaningful results. That also means every product is flat and grey, though.

It could also just be a side-effect of having to appeal to every person on the planet, though. Sort of the design equivalent of a good politician, appealing to the lowest common denominator in all of us. Nothing to object to, but also nothing to love. Just flat and grey, with clearly displayed content and A/B optimized calls to action.

I find it incredibly boring and I'm getting tired of them rolling out new products that all look and feel exactly the same, but I suspect they have numbers that show any big design change would just be leaving money on the table.

The Google+ page doesn't even appear to have any breakpoints, which is against their own guidelines:

https://material.google.com/layout/responsive-ui.html#

Maybe those gutters are reserved for ads?

"Web design isn't the solution. Web design is the problem."

Actually, another huge part of the problem are really crappy default entity properties by the W3C.

Some other examples: [2][3]

[1] http://masonry.desandro.com/layout.html

[2] http://halcyon-theme.tumblr.com/

[3] http://www.erikjohanssonphoto.com/work

Twitter has three columns when you load the page, but then just one as you scroll down. It doesn't look as strange.

Also... you can make the same comment about hacker news, yet here we are.

There's a setting :-

Stream Restrict stream to single-column layout on all screen sizes

do you have this on?

But there's more! If I click inside the search bar, i get a 2 seconds pause to load "featured collections", "featured communities", "Suggested People & Pages" and "Suggested Posts" REPLACING THE PAGE I'M ON because Google clearly knows better.

I want my context to be preserved in the tab that I’m in. I didn’t “log out” of Google+ so I should be logged-in still.

These are the basics. Before they Material-Design-the-hell-out-of everything, maybe they should create a foundation that works properly.

In summary: * yet another redesign * mobile centric (looks like p on desktop) * removes important features (events, hangouts tight integration) * forces users into addictive content-discovery * works only now, the moment masses join it, lolcats will ruin it

Sorry, content discovery has NO value for humans at the level we have it currently. Content is everywhere. It's easy to find valuable content. Whole this content discovery concept is riding on the addictive behaviour of humans: I'm losing everything I dont know about, so I need to scroll newstream every 5 minutes. While it serves one purpose: page impressions stimulated by habbit/addiction.

It harms us. We don't need content discovery. Corpos need our eyeballs.

Collections is like following random Pinterest boards created by other people. I don't know about others, but I like to follow official things, or things that have the most followers but none of that info seems to be surfaced. Featured really means nothing to me. Is it hand-picked? Randomly generated featured? Are they paid to be featured?

Communities are cool but it's really hard nowadays to beat the communities in subreddits. Anonymous users seem to give a lot more to the community in an unselfish manner vs. Google+ users seem to post in communities in a self-promoting manner. This could just be anecdotal and my subjective viewpoint but that's what I see.

I honestly don't know how Google can do social, but I'm glad they're trying different things. Hopefully they try something new.

Random thought: I find Slack very similar to Google Wave.

For something that's supposedly social, I'm deeply disappointed with how Google+ has been developed (read neglected) over time. I like some aspects of G+ (like the layout, font, font sizes, etc.), but two things that are grating are the lack of custom URLs and the unintuitive navigation scheme (compared to Facebook). I still post to G+ once in a while (although, there's really no audience there) and look for improvements with the hope that I can start nudging people away from Facebook and get more traction on an alternative platform (another walled garden, but at least not as evil, IMO). It's sad, for me, that even long wait times don't show much for progress. If the strategy seemed convoluted while Vic Gundotra was managing it, his departure left the platform languishing as if it were a part time project.

Anyone from the Google+ team reading this - firstly, please bring in basic stuff to the platform that's important for people to share, and secondly, please copy Facebook shamelessly in whatever it's doing well for user experience.

Lastly, thanks a lot for (reverting to and) retaining the freedom of users to use pseudonyms on the platform!

Even worse, particularly for YouTube users, the first version of this "integration" didn't respect at all that a YouTube channel is not a person, and a person is not a YouTube channel. (It's a many-to-many relationship, morons.) And when they forced Google+ comments on YouTube channels, the damned thing didn't even slightly work correctly.

Basically, they unforgivably fucked-up their own product and made all of their most engaged users hate them with a passion. Honestly, it's a miracle they didn't get more bad press for that shitstorm.

Apparently, it's now possible to once again have a YouTube or Gmail account without associating it with a Google+ account. But of course for people who lived through that campaign of awfulness, there's no way to undo the damage and get my Gmail and YouTube accounts back the way they were before Google+ fucked them over in the first place.

---

For what it's worth, I'm not a Facebook user. I wasn't prior to Google+ and I'm not now. So maybe I'm the freak. But I don't think I'm alone in my opinion of Google+ or the sheer incompetence of its rollout.

And that's sad, because I really wanted them to beat out FB.

I think I have these accounts:

* Personal Gmail

* Professional Gmail

* Google+ account somehow auto-generated from personal Gmail even though I've never (on purpose, anyway) used Google+

* Google+ account somehow auto-generated from professional Gmail

* YouTube channel A

* YouTube channel B

* YouTube channel somehow auto-generated to match with my professional Gmail even though I've never to my knowledge used YouTube from that account at all?

* Some weird random Google+ page that seems to have come from nowhere for no reason, but it shows up anyway if I go into Google and click "my accounts". (Possibly generated by "logging into" Chrome, which I foolishly did once? Who knows.)

And I'm terrified to even try and fix the situation because I know a single wrong click and they'll delete all my YouTube videos, or all my emails. And, natch, there's ZERO customer support for this, but why would you expect that from Google.

I'd pay $50 to get all this shit fixed back to the way it was before Google fucked it all over in the first place. Seriously. I just want separate accounts for separate email addresses and separate YouTube channels. I never wanted them consolidated in the goddamned first place.

I also think making an incredibly careful integration of Google Reader, the one social network they did right, would have helped (though not cancelling it would have been best of all). I still wish they simply evolved Google Reader into a fully fledged social network.

Oops, that should be good will, not for will.

No one who joined Facebook joined because they wanted free webmail, or a document collaboration platform, or upload and comment on funny videos with a pseudonym; so we knew what we were getting: social networking. On the other hand, most people who got started with a Google account did so because of Gmail or Docs; meanwhile Youtube was a distinct network with pseudonyms.

The Google+ push introduced real names on Youtube, and presented a cross-correlated 'Google identity' for every Google user, creating a social network where there was no user expectation of one.

Google wanted a pretty graph of humanity's friendships. So they worked really hard on making it nice to input those relationship through those pretty circles (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMZP-oyOII).

But inputting those vertices in the graph does not benefit users, and they feel that. In Facebook, it worked because Facebook had focused on the users: they wanted to be someone's friend to use Facebook's communication tools. And Facebook had a great chat system and a competent publishing platform.

G+ never had a great chat system (Hangout always felt sluggish, obtrusive and undifferentiated, unlike GTalk and Facebook Messenger) and its publishing platform was subpar (Medium came six months later, Tumblr had been around for seven years, both have a much superior editor and offer a more pleasing reading experience).

You can't beat the competition with a lesser core product.

They also had some major problems when it first launched: performance was terrible, there was absolutely no thought for spam control or collapsing duplicate shares (three people share that daily show episode = nothing else on the screen), and the web and at least the iOS app didn't allow you to push notifications so if you didn't want to get notified every time some stranger added you to a circle, you had to delete the app and learn to ignore the plus symbol on the top of every Google property. It took 6-18 months before any progress was made on any of these problems.

The real killer, though, was that as soon as the beta ended they pushed all of their users to join it, ensuring that everyone had a negative experience and were trained to avoid it. When they eventually fixed some of the problems, it was only months after everyone except for Google employees and die-hard fans had stopped using it.

One particularly bad area for this was when they forced the Google Reader community to use Google+ instead of the extremely popular Reader social network, because while that community wasn't terribly large it was heavily used and the audience ran disproportionately to journalists, bloggers, academics, and other influencers. Since Google+ offered only negatives compared to Reader's native social network (e.g. Google+ sharing in Reader didn't work on mobile browsers at all), that meant that for months the news and social coverage was skewed heavily towards complaints about how bad Google+ was.

Initially Google+ was invite only. Techie people wanted to get in. News outlets reported on it. Common people basically never had a shot at getting in until, what was it, like 5 or 6 months later? Google essentially created the largest amount of friction possible to join their new, hot, social network that everyone was talking about and then when they mostly stopped talking about it they opened it up.

Beyond the initial friction it had a surprising amount of speed bumps at the start. There were multiple times where it was simply down and they mentioned running out of storage space at least once. Google, the giant that scales everything to seemingly infinite to the common person, couldn't keep an invite only social network up.

They also didn't make it simple to get into. When you went to Google's homepage there was basically a tiny, tiny link at the top that probably a tiny fraction of people notice and that was it. It wasn't hooked into Gmail, Google's most used application. It wasn't hooked into Maps or even Google search! Even today it's still not hooked into ANY of these things to a degree in which you can interact with it.

I'm not sure who was in charge of Google+ at the time but whoever they are they either didn't understand social networking at all or they just wanted to kill Google+. I reject any other possibilities.

I really liked the way Google+ worked, too. I'm still pretty disappointed that it's essentially a failed project that Google will kill eventually.

Google fundamentally do not get social interactions, period.

General access to G+ was a month or two after initial public beta. I argue that was too soon.

Facebook, by contrast, expanded from Harvard, to other Ivys and Stanford, selective admissions colleges, and finally general public access, over 2-3 years. It somewhat followed Usenet's development in this, and I think in both cases, the selective founding cohort and acculturalisation primed both networks for larger appeal.

The thought of somehow mixing up their private life with social media is just too scary. What if the photos I take on my phone appear in my feed somewhere and I don't realize it for 3 months?

Someone I don't know added me to their circles. What the hell does that even mean? Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post? Do they see what I post? Why wasn't I asked for my permission? I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post. Who are they and what do they want? This sucks, I'm leaving.

As the sole means of creating a directed social graph, it's awful.

It means they want to see stuff you post, and/or post stuff that (if you circle them back) you will see.

>Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post?

What? No. That would be super dumb.

>Do they see what I post?

If it's public or if you post it to a circle that includes them.

>Why wasn't I asked for my permission?

Because they haven't been granted any special powers by virtue of adding you to a circle.

>I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post.

Then don't post publicly- choose a more limited audience to post to.

>Who are they and what do they want?

Go to their profile page and find out, if you care. But you probably don't- it's safe to ignore them.

This right here is where it goes from being a sane metaphor to an insane one. It's the phrase "circle them back" that has no meaning in human relationships, but is an all-important step in google plus.

I always understood the point of "circles" as how we privately define our personal world and our relationships with others, which may not necessarily be how those people view us. In comparison, I see Facebook's "lists" model less intuitive for people to understand and use.

Google doesn't do customer service well. I'll give a current example from yesterday that I posted on HN. If you go to news.google.com and search for: North Dakota Indigenous people, you will get an article from snopes.com with a totally wrong and, frankly, racist headline with a one paragraph description that reads like a hit piece on the ND governor. I submitted feedback and highlighted the article and yet its still there 24 hours later.

This horrible response to issues does tend to make people think about things.

For a very brief time G+ seemed to have a lot of potential as it looked like it could become a worthy successor to Livejournal and forums for niche interest discussion, but with a social focus. It worked rather well for photographers too.

Those weren't the directions they emphasised with their many update experiments. They give communities, but take by a design update that showed a few lines only of a long comment unless you clicked on it. Discussions became rarer and that opportunity was lost.

Most of the communicators drifted off to FB and other platforms and what seemed to remain was mainly Google fans and meme sharers. I know some persevere, but no one I actually know still uses it.

Missed opportunity sums it up rather well.

I usually hate one-note comments about the web platform of the postings, but since this is a blogpost about Google Plus webdesign, hosted on Google Plus... I guess it's telling.

No, I will not start using it again.

By the way, the new design looks great I just wished the performance could be better for Firefox.

[Edited for clarification]

To me, Wave felt shut down too early.. and of course, way over hyped. By comparison to Wave, i'm shocked Plus still exists.

There's a sense there of some hostility between the groups involved at the time and something of a hostility against the "techie-first" nature of the company before plus. I'm one of the ones that question if Google lost a lot of its "soul" in building Plus and trying to be more like Facebook.

I figure there's an alternate universe out there where something like Plus started as a smarter merger of Wave and Reader, and I'm curious what that would have looked like.

Looks like Google decided to be in it for the long haul with Google Plus, but let Google wave die due to a lack of popularity. But that would have been a very good product to play the long game with.

I don't care what it looks like, if it doesn't work, I won't use it.

I also used the Hangouts on Air feature extensively and never understood why it had to be originated in + and why you _had_ to invite people. The best use case for this tool was to do screen recording that was automatically imported into YouTube but getting the right combination of + account and YouTube account and making sure you were authorized to use Hangouts on Air with YouTube was incredibly frustrating. Hopefully the new flow using YouTube Live will allow going on-air without forcing you to invite an audience.

And while I'm at it - suggesting people join Communities but hiding the fact that there are sub-topics in these communities was a huge dark pattern I hated. I joined the Linux community thinking I would see some interesting packages or hacks or discussions and all I found was perpetual posting of Wind0w$ is teh Suck memes and obvious spam. The _majority_ of my interactions on + was marking posts as spam and blocking users hoping content would improve, and it never did. It wasn't until much later that I figured out I could unsubscribe from sub-topics, if I could only find where they were listed.

http://scobleizer.com/why-yo-daddy-wont-use-google-no-noise-...

Blocking fuckwits helps, but you've got to be tremendously brutal about it.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...

I absolutely recommend people check out what he posts: https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski is his G+, but he's actually surprisingly active on LinkedIn of all places, and I'm pretty sure Twitter as well.

There's some irony in that, given G+ design really looks like 'mobile first'

Proof that Google+ 1.0 was an enormous flop.

https://plus.google.com/+LukeWroblewski/posts/Zcn7bDAwqmm

Slack's value mostly comes from their brand not their product. Same as how Dropbox can provide a weak and expensive service but still be the goto choice for what it does.

I think the people who do use G+ are going to use it a hell of a lot more now that it is so much faster. Plus the people who get frustrated by Twitter's 140 character limit from time to time may be easily swayed.

Anyhow, what's this thread about?

Nor is Google+ in hospital; it's one of those patients who leave early because, having a lot to do at home, they convince themselves that they feel well.

That doesn't appear to be one of the guidelines when commenting on HN.

For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps ironically, making comments about "likening HN to Reddit" despite having a young account IS explicitly mentioned in the guidelines.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12393173

Humor is fairly universal

Reddit comments are invariably a cesspool of shit outside of a handful of decent, smaller subs.

Reddit subs lack a consistent moderation quality, though the ones who moderate well, and I'll give AskScience and AskHistorians as stellar examples, maintain exceptionally high-quality discussions. They are also not entirely humourless (AH's FAQ addresses this and points to some examples), but there's a difference between being overrun by cheap jokes, and using dark humour to point out an obviously unclothed emperor.

I've used Google+ since public beta, was tremendously enthusiastic for it, and have been washed through disillusionment after disillusionment in the process. The extent to which it's exposed what I'm finding to be the true Google -- a largely evil advertising empire with a vestigal, and yes, sometimes principled technology arm attached -- has been both profound and ironic (I doubt this was the original intent).

It's not that Google are alone in being an evil tech company, the most evil, or even above average. But something huge rotted in that beast and is consuming it from the inside out.

http://prntscr.com/ccb22r