Lessons from Google Plus

Google Plus is about to die. Enough has been said about the mismanagement of the last great social media network elsewhere; I'll not waste space on repeating things that others have expressed with far more insight than I can manage. Instead, as Plus enters its long night, let me reflect on what made it such a much-loved venue. Whether some of these features were by accident or design hardly matters. What's important is that they really worked, and any other network ought to consider imitation as the highest form of flattery. At its zenith, Google Plus was absolutely superb.


It was an anti-social network

I fell into G+ by accident because it was provided automatically by virtue of integration with Gmail. There was no good reason not to try it. Since there was hardly anyone on it, at first I was using it as little more than a glorified form of email, able to send pictures and messages to people I actually knew. At some point, helped largely by the actions of people like Winchell "Atomic Space Kitty" Chung and Ciro "Most Likely To Be Part Of The Borg Collective" Villa, I began to use it properly.

And it was perfect ! Back in the PhD office in Cardiff, all I'd ever heard about Facebook was people checking it constantly, posting pictures of drunken escapades and who was "friends" with who. G+ wasn't like that at all. It was a place for people to discuss common interests, in my case astronomy. It wasn't devoid of more traditionally social topics, but they weren't high priority either. It was a place for discussion. Actual intelligent conversation with diverse people, almost all of whom were similarly against the "let's share out drunken photos" pointlessness of Facebook. That most basic aspect of "we're here to discuss what we find interesting", rather than talking about each other, that's what made the whole thing work.

We all know this isn't quite true, but this isn't the place for a deep analysis.

It was also its greatest weakness. Most people I know who are on FB aren't there to discuss the news with strangers - they want to connect with people they already know and use it as a convenient mass-messaging service. There was, and almost certainly will continue to be, no good reason from them to switch to anywhere else. What would be the point ? They would only be holding the same conversations in a different venue. At the same time, this provided a powerful selection effect towards people who did want to hold interesting conversations. Ironically, for a network that wasn't really terribly social in the conventional sense, it thrived because of its awesome community.


Collections and Communities

Not that G+ was entirely devoid of people-management capabilities by any means. Its two greatest developments were Collections and Communities. Collections were highly customisable ways of organising your posts with a series of convenient labels. People could choose, say, only to follow your Awesome Astronomy collection (even if they weren't interested in astronomy in general) and, conversely, ignore your ones about Epic Food Porn (even if they were normally very interested in food), or follow every single thing you ever posted. It meant that if you wanted to, you could very easily only see discussions on science or politics from people you trusted, and you didn't have to deal with people who abused the system because you could simply choose not to follow their Collections.

Communities were a places where you could interact with a potentially much larger audience on whatever topic the Community was based around. It was my privilege to moderate (and eventually co-run) the Space community, which at our peak had 879,091 members. G+ left running Communities largely up to their owners, which meant that they could develop however their members and owners wanted. At the same time, if you reported a Community for being dangerous (as I did for several white supremacist communities) then they were swiftly taken down. This was a powerful and sensible use of allowing self-developed networks but tempered judiciously with common sense hierarchical oversight.

What made these features work was that they were not filter bubbles. By basing the discussions around common interests, not self-labels of political affiliation or whatever, you could interact with a very diverse audience. This didn't mean that some people didn't choose to wall themselves in, but for my part I found the most interesting people were the ones from outside my particular background. And that's a key message for any social network : encourage diversity of thought through choice, not diktat.


Circles

Circles were G+'s first Big Thing. Like Collections, you could customise these yourself. G+'s model was that you could follow people rather than being friends with them. That meant that you could see what they posted and there was no need for them to reciprocate, like subscribing to a YouTube channel. A Circle was simply a list of a subset of the people you followed, organised however you wanted, e.g. you might have a Family Circle or a Mesoamerican Architecture Circle or whatever. You could share your posts with everyone or just particular Circles of people who you knew where interested in a topic.

Circles had some serious limitations. Something posted to a Circle could not be reshared by other Circle members to the general public (useful in principle, but some people used this for absolutely everything no matter how innocuous), which made discovery difficult. Many people shared posts exclusively to Circles, which meant that if they followed you, you'd have no way of knowing what they themselves tended to post - so you'd have to follow them to find out. To be honest it was a bit of a mess, especially because real people tend to post about multiple topics. Circles let you organise your stream by social group, but not really by subject matter. On the other hand, you could share Circles with other people, making it possible to rapidly grow your following. Unfortunately this meant the feature became abused and Circles were eventually ignored by basically everyone.

I can't help feeling that combining Circles with Collections would have been a huge breakthrough. Grouping Collections, rather than people, into their own Circles, would have been a far more powerful way to organise what I was seeing.

What was really important was that you didn't have to share to a Circle if you didn't want to. While G+ didn't really have a way of seeing every public post by every user, you could at least make posts visible to any user (who happened to have the link) by making them Public. You could also send a notification to your Circle if you posted there, making it much more likely your post would actually be seen. This was somewhat messy and asymmetrically implemented, as was the feature whereby if you plussed a post then sometimes your followers would see that action. These were good features but in need for further development, e.g. allowing followers more control of what they saw so no-one need to ask someone to turn off a feature that others would prefer to stay on.


Long form posts

At least, you could if you wanted to. There was nothing to stop you waffling on almost indefinitely. You could only do some very basic formatting but that was enough to write long, detailed posts (it should go without saying that you could edit them afterwards). Some people abused this and wrote stupidly long essays in a format that was quite unreadable, but in the main it meant that detailed discussions were not discouraged. You could limit yourself to a single quote or write page after page if you wanted. And the post would be given its own URL so you could link back to this from external sources, as long as it was public : what happened on G+ didn't have to stay on G+ unless you wanted it to. Choice was again a key aspect. You didn't have to write long posts, but you had the option.


It was free

And even more importantly, it was free of adverts. That meant the only manipulation of your feed was done to show you things you might have missed overnight or to highlight people and Collections you might like to follow. Now this didn't always work so well - it was a constant niggle that your stream could look slightly different each time you saw it. But it was billions and billions of times better than the advert-driven model of FB, which has led to nothing but woe and civil strife. Driving discussions and intelligent conversations by increasing profits for mega-corporations is such an obviously gaaaaagggghhhh flaw that I see no reason to expound any further on that point; it's been done to death elsewhere already anyway.


You could block idiots

If you wanted to you could exclude whoever you like from participating in your conversations. That was a very permanent (though you could unblock someone), very total solution - they couldn't even see anything you posted. Their comments would remain on your posts but you could also choose to delete them.

I used this feature sparingly, with a total of 43 blocks (out of ~2100 followers - it was never a ghost town !) over the full run of the service and most of them were spam accounts. Others used it very much more liberally. While it would have been much better to have some more nuanced people management, e.g. banning them from only certain Collections or individual posts, having this absolute exclusion was a necessity more than a luxury. Sure, it's good to hear the other side. But it's no good if you have a private dinner party on the theme of herpotology and a robot barges in and won't shut up about the cellular structure of hagfish (on the internet this can literally happen). This feature didn't need to be used much, but it was essential in making life bearable. It only takes one unfettered idiot to ruin the whole social media experience.


Integrated services

At its peak of good management, if you got a comment on a post you could see the entire thread, with correct formatting, in your Gmail inbox. You could automatically translate selected posts and comments. You could embed YouTube videos at a reasonable size, upload photos directly (including obscure formats like 360 panoramas). And all this was very easy to do.

This integration was a fundamentally good thing, but sometimes Google bungled this in obviously hideous ways. Integrating YouTube and G+ comments was by far the worst case, where suddenly your nice, sensible G+ discussions could be bombarded by hordes of screaming idiots for no obvious reason. Google, it's been suggested, could have made G+ really work if they'd focused on having it as a sort of central hub for their other services. I suspect there's truth in that had Google handled things rather better than they did, but that road not taken is not something I care to explore. It was too good a service to rage against the dying of the light. Better to celebrate what it got right than complain about a failure I had no way of preventing.



Farewell, Google Plus

These then are my key lessons for any social media network hoping to make a difference. It should ideally be free, but more important is to avoid advertising. It should allow users to self-direct, but not completely without oversight. It needs to allow people to choose and organise what they see and who they follow with a clear, accessible interface. Google Plus gave us ways to break out of filter bubbles. It gave us intelligent discourse with people of opposing views who were not simple-minded baboons. It surely deserved a better fate.

For all that the system itself encouraged its success, it was the users above all who made Google Plus what it was. I won't pretend it was perfect, or that sometimes I didn't think a whole bunch of people were complete morons. But to you, my fellow refugees, I say this : for the countless discussions, thank you. For making me realise when I was wrong, even if I never admitted it, thank you. For the things I laughed at but never plussed or reshared, thank you. For making me realise how diverse, weird, wonderful and crazy you all are, thank you. For being such an awesome and interesting bunch, thank you. For those of you who won't be moving to a new social media home - the best who lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity - you will be missed. After nearly eight years, at least we had a damn good run.

As I said in my very first post, back in July 2011 : So... social networking eh ? How 'bout that.