User:Woozle/Google+/critique

I've been a G+ user since July 2011, approximately the day it went live -- a family member was on the G+ privacy committee, and sent me an invite.

This is my assessment of what's right about G+ and what's wrong with it, after over a year of heavy usage.

Overview

I've generally felt positively about G+ from a technical perspective, but much less so conceptually. While the initial concept as deployed seemed like quite a solid foundation, since then it has gone in a direction which implies that G+ management view G+ not as a tool but as entertainment -- more precisely, a platform for aggregation and dispersal of a small selection of entertainment.

The emphasis on "what's hot" and "trending" indicators, for example, serves only to focus everyone's attention on the output a relatively small number of users -- those who are already popular. Our culture already has a surplus of "winner-take-all" mechanisms. Social networking is one of the few tools that serves to connect individuals with each other -- and Google's attempt to override that peer-to-peer topology with one that is centralized and moderated (presumably by carefully-tweaked algorithms) shows that either they do not understand this or perhaps that they are hostile to it.

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Notes

Originally written in response to this.