alt Hacker NewsEveryone 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.
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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.
+ 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)
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.