Today, April 2nd, 2019, marks the death of Google+, Google’s much maligned social network service. For many, this is something that has been a long time coming, but I actually have a different outlook on this event.
The reason? I actually liked what Google+ was! At least, in general idea, and a few things it brought, if not the end execution and what the service actually was over the years.
When Google+ came into usage in 2011, my immediate thought was, honestly, that it would take off. Given how Android based phones had become quite standard by then, a social network from Google seemed like a solid idea. I wasn’t aware of the previous failures Google had had in that field, but this was different. This felt like something that could work, and while I wasn’t too excited personally, I felt it had potential.
Then, I actually got to use it, and I got some mixed feelings.
On the positives, the design was alright. It was like Facebook if Facebook wasn’t terrible, if that makes sense to anyone reading. Circles were a cool way to group people, the +1 feature, similar to Facebook’s “Like” felt right, and the overall experience, in principle, was good to me. The probably best aspect, really, was how your Google account on a whole kind of got “taken over” by it, and how Google had (infamously) at the time forced Google+ into YouTube.
Yes, I actually liked Google+ being forced into YouTube.
The reasons were to do with the way user interaction worked or, better to say, the ability to limit it — an absolute favorite feature was being able to stop replies on a comment you made. To put it simply, this kept “noise” down — dumb replies, trolls, people who just want to argue, etc. It was the best thing to ever come to YouTube and goddamnit I wish they would bring this back.
Otherwise, it was neat at the time that you could leave a comment over 500 words. Google+ integration allowed this, and I took advantage of it sometimes. Sure, you lost the ability to reply to pre-G+ comments, but that didn’t bother me personally.
However, there were some major problems I had with the service.
First off, let’s face it — it’s fucking Google, the ultimate in “let’s spy on everything our users do and sell that information” company. So, a social network from them naturally felt like even more of a way to gather subtle details about what people like, do, interact with, whatever. Still, that’s to be expected — even as much as I generally dislike Google / Alphabet / whatever they want to call themselves to avoid antitrust / monopoly litigation, I still use their services, acknowledging the hypocrisy as a “necessary evil” in my life.
That being said I used Google+ cautiously, more as a way to express information more than as a way to network and engage. Keeping the profile as low as I can with that one. Besides, there was one greater aspect which I despised to no end.
The “Real Name” Policy.
In the early days, Google+ forced you to use your real name. Now, that’s something most on the internet know is generally best left hidden if you’re going to do or say anything that someone might disagree with. With Google+, this anonymity wasn’t an option, but in the interest of usage I went with it. Let’s just say in the long run I’m not happy with that, as it permeated everything – including YouTube. Hell at one point when they finally gave us custom vanity URLs mine got stuck as my real name, as opposed to my pseudonym. This also got tied to YouTube, something you can obviously imagine I had contention with.
It was actually due to this I went through a bit of a “professional” phase online, echos of which can be found on older posts here, and scattered around the internet. That didn’t last long, and I rather hate that I even went through that phase as it really deviated this site for, well, years — I’m still slowly getting things back to how they *should* be!
Incidentally, it looks like Google early on got the memo that many weren’t happy with using their real names and apparently early on allowed people to change their names… but didn’t really tell people. I didn’t find out about it until way late in the services life, maybe towards 2014 or early 2015, at which time they were getting ready to completely remove YouTube and other mandatory integration from the platform.
By maybe 2016 I had had enough of the whole thing — ironically, more pissed that YouTube and G+ were disconnected and that I had lost the ability to limit replies (one infamous comment I made in September 2016 made me damn near want to delete everything, no joke — I wish I had the ability to limit replies when that happened) than the other issues and their resulting damage, I nuked my G+ account.
Now, this didn’t really erase it fully – it did reset some things, which was my end goal, and did kill off some other secondary things which came back when I re-created the account, giving me a fresh start in what wasn’t tied to the Google account itself — the lines of what was actually Google+ and what was Google itself were still as blurry as ever.
So, from whenever the hell I did that onward (I can’t actually recall) I simply used it as a dumping ground for posts from Xadara. That’s it – Simply a way to share posts. By this time I had worked out (as best Google allowed) all the previous URL issues, so I left things as they were, and that was that.
The service was all but dead by this stage – it’s been on life support for a while now, which is something I just don’t get, given how, honestly, good it did work. My best guess as to the cause of this is that it didn’t give anything new. Twitter and for its time Vine and the like did the microblogging and mini video thing, Facebook had the “social hub” thing down, YouTube itself, while not a proper social network, was the video site, what did Google+ actually bring? A Google-centric social layer that people, for whatever reason, didn’t want? That’s about it. It just didn’t have a need, I guess.
The final nail in the coffin was when an issue was discovered that allowed for possible data leakage – at that point Google saw an excuse to kill the service, and today that’s what they did – Google+ in its standard form is no more, joining an incredibly long line of Google services and projects which have been killed off.
So, yeah. I have mixed feelings about it all. I feel like Google+ could have been salvaged, but then again I also feel like it shouldn’t have failed. At the same time, I see why it did.
There were so many things it brought that I liked, but then they were taken away when things were disassociated. That I won’t ever understand — why remove something as useful as no replies to comments was tied to Google+ and couldn’t be kept around in YouTube itself? The ideas, like +1, are good, an should have stuck around. That’s something I’ll get into in the near future but basically the idea was there.. it just didn’t work in the end.
Oh well. It is what it is. Google+ is gone, but knowing how Google does things, they will “bring it back” in some newer, stupider form that will try to take even more of your information and knowing how this goes that one will stick around yet will be worse than what Google+ ever could have been.
It’s funny, really, in the end — them forcing it into YouTube was probably what made people avoid it the most, even though it brought the one thing I loved most about Google services in the past decade or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B