
Google+ for consumers will shut down on April 2nd - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/google-for-consumers-will-shut-down-on-april-2nd/
======
gnachman
The real tragedy is that g+ wrecked Google. It was a nice place to work that I
was proud of. They got scared of Facebook and threw out reason, taste, common
sense, and ethics in an incompetent desperate rush to win Social. It was
deeply saddening to watch it happen. Now the parasite is gone but too late for
the host.

~~~
jmkd
As an employee on another team, I remember at launch when the extended Plus
team got flown to Hawaii to celebrate, around the time their marketing made
its way on to the homepage. I sat incredulous, back in the office with my
colleagues thinking how gross it was that an obvious failure from the off got
rewarded and supported in such a manner. It marked a real shift in my personal
perspective of the company.

I realised much later that the team were effectively being rewarded for having
being punished prior to launch. The offsite was an apology for the grotesque
demands put on them during the extended crunch.

The commitment to the product was so complete that nobody involved could see
the wood for the trees, and we saw the damaging impact of reality distortion
first hand.

~~~
Gustomaximus
> The commitment to the product was so complete that nobody involved could see
> the wood for the trees, and we saw the damaging impact of reality distortion
> first hand.

This is where I find this 'you must have passion for your job & company' to be
problematic. You get this worker cult environments where how dare someone use
a competitor typer scenarios. Or managers surrounding themselves with yes men.

A bit of neutrality in job attitude is good. You still take pride in doing a
good job but the pride should be in your actions, not the company/product.

------
DarrenZ
What no one has mentioned so far is that this will have a direct impact on any
sites, forums, apps, etc. that use Google+ Oauth for Google log in. My own
support forum does and I received my first email about this only a couple of
days ago.

>Please update your projects listed below by March 7, 2019 and ensure they are
no longer using Google+ APIs, or requesting Google+ OAuth scopes.

Sure, it won't be that difficult to change, but this isn't something you do
every day. You do it once and then forget about it. The initial investigation
of how to add a Google login and then implementing it was done 2 years ago --
now I have to go off and research and learn how to do it all again in a
different way.

~~~
zawerf
Google's own tutorials for node.js recommends using passport.js with google
oauth: [https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/getting-
started/authenticate...](https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/getting-
started/authenticate-users)

But that library hasn't been updated to not use the deprecated api yet:
[https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-google-
oauth2/issues...](https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-google-
oauth2/issues/50)

And even when the fix lands, you still need to make specific code changes for
it.

They can't possibly expect everyone to fix their social login code in time
right? 50k weekly downloads: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/passport-google-
oauth20](https://www.npmjs.com/package/passport-google-oauth20)

~~~
williamstein
jaredhanson who maintains passport-google-oauth2 seems unfortunately MIA since
October, and it seems he's the only one that can update that package. Google
says they are degrading services already (starting Jan 28), so some sites
could start seeing problems already. The fixes to the passport-google-oauth2
are _nontrivial_ and require a fork (not just a configuration change).
Fortunately, there's a lot of discussion on this PR:
[https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-google-
oauth2/pull/5...](https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-google-
oauth2/pull/51)

At the bottom of the PR discussion, there is a link to a fork that somebody
created here: [https://github.com/passport-next/passport-google-
oauth2](https://github.com/passport-next/passport-google-oauth2) As far as I
can tell, the only way to continue using node + google oauth right now is to
switch to using that hard-to-find fork. That's what I've done with
[https://cocalc.com](https://cocalc.com).

------
chomp
I'm a little saddened to hear this because there's some high quality posts on
Google+ that we're going to lose (Linus and other FOSS people posted on
there.) I always enjoyed reading some of the things they put on there.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Email me breadcrumbs and I’ll get them into the Wayback Machine.

~~~
Pamar
Please start with this:
[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

~~~
skarz
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190131083617/https://plus.goog...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190131083617/https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

------
skarz
I think the real reason why G+ didn't take off is because younger people were
oversaturated with social media networks and most older people had already
learned how to use Facebook. I think if I approached any of my older relatives
with G+ they would have surely said "But I just learned how to use Facebook,
now you want me to learn ANOTHER website!" The fact that any of my aging
relatives is on Facebook is a miracle in and of itself.

I think G+ had done everything correctly, it was just too late. Same reason
why there are still no real competitors to Facebook.

The real question is... How does Google unfuck all of the mandatory G+
integration that they forced on everyone?

~~~
taneq
The big issue for me and a lot of the community was their policy on mandatory
use of real names. Facebook wanted to own your online identity but Google
wanted to own your real-life identity. The moment they started pushing that
policy G+ turned into a ghost town.

The mandatory G+ integration, btw, was one of the core goals of G+ IMO. They
wanted to tie everyone's accounts together into a single entity (again, owning
your identity) and G+ was the chosen vehicle.

~~~
Moru
Isn't Facebook requiring real names too?

~~~
skarz
Their policies are contradicting. On one page it states that you should use
the name that you guy by in real life. On another page it says you may be
required to show proof of that being your name.

[https://www.facebook.com/help/229715077154790](https://www.facebook.com/help/229715077154790)

[https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185](https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185)

------
crystaln
The real tragedy here is the destruction of Reader for a failed and ill-
conceived product.

Had Google used the passionate Reader community as a base to build a high
quality content based social network, they would be a powerful force in social
and could have an enormous positive social impact.

~~~
speedplane
Reader had nothing to do with Google+, yet the comparison is still relevant.
It would have been much easier to turn Reader into a social network than to
create one from scratch.

It's still shocking to me that Google shut down reader. I'm not sure I've come
across any company that has abandoned such a beloved product.

~~~
mcv
A system that does both social networking and RSS reading, and enables blog
sharing and commenting in a integrated way, could be absolutely perfect.

------
dallas
G+ was _the_ place to be for one of my hobbies (OSR/DIY D&D). A massive blow.

I made jokes about if we hang in there and don't get taken in the Google+
Rapture, things will go on like normal. Turns out G Suite users get to keep G+
and I'm a GAFYD user since the beginning. Yay for me?

Everyone is now displaced. Facebook is universally reviled as an option,
Mastodon/Diaspora has attracted a whopping several folks. Some others tried
starting forums to no avail.

Discord seems to be doing well for many but not a majority. MeWe is the only
platform that people seem to "get" but it has a controversy to it.

Nevertheless, the blogs still seem to be ticking along.

~~~
bad_user
> _Nevertheless, the blogs still seem to be ticking along._

Unless something changes fundamentally about the web, which I doubt, blogs
will be here long after current social networks are dead. RSS / Atom too, for
as long as there are blogs around, in spite of what some people would like you
to believe.

And if there's one thing that you can say about the Internet, is that the
Internet's stack of technologies is long lasting and the more things change,
the more they stay the same.

So yeah, if you want to publish content for others, the safest bet is to have
your own blog. With RSS and email subscriptions. And your own domain of
course.

~~~
mcv
Blogs are much closer to the way the Web should be than social networks are.
Have your own space. The only thing is that I would like an easy system that
would allow me to follow multiple blogs in a social-network style stream/feed.

I hear Hubzilla might do something like that.

~~~
tomjen3
I may be missing something obvious here, but isn't that literally what RSS is
for?

Which is actually how I found this article.

~~~
mcv
RSS is for following blogs, but not specifically for integrating them into
social networks. That's the thing I want.

------
jchallis
Google+ was one of the few places on the Internet I could go to be alone.
Everywhere else seems so damn full of people.

~~~
gbersac
Your comment is good as a joke. If it is not, it's sad.

------
exodust
Goes to show that aggressively pushing products down user's throats doesn't
work in the end.

Even to leave a star rating for an app on the play store, without a comment,
you had to have a G+ profile. It was idiotic how much they pushed Google+.
Also a bad name. "Plus".... plus what? Who knows!

~~~
wenderen
I haven't rated apps in years thanks to this policy. I wonder what other
quality of life improvements will resurface after G+ for consumers is
shuttered.

------
dekhn
I was onstage at Google IO one year (Urs and I launched Google Compute
Engine). ALl our practice sessions were preempted by Vic Gundotra (launching
G+ Events) and Sergey Brin (launching Google Glass with the most epic tech
demo I've ever seen). But now, the first two are dead products while GCE makes
$$$ for Google. It was a real FU to me and my coworkers, and even then it was
obvious that social and glass weren't billion-dollar products.

------
geerlingguy
The lack of activity in this thread is quite appropriate. Another one bites
the dust.

------
wl
Does this mean we'll get our plus operator back?

~~~
est
Does this mean we'll get our Google Reader back?

~~~
dingaling
Why feed Google even more data about your interests? Just use a local RSS
aggregator.

------
systematical
I was never really sure what they were trying to do with marketing it, the
feature set, or the vanilla design. Pretty sure my first and only post on
there was "RIP Google+ 2011-2011"

------
Causality1
For years I have resisted allowing the creation of a google+ profile on my
behalf. I wonder, on April 2nd will my plus-less YouTube account finally be
able to comment and message again?

~~~
klodolph
This happened a couple years ago.

[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2663685?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2663685?hl=en)

~~~
guessmyname
That’s interesting, because I haven’t been able to log into my YouTube account
since Aug 2015 after they suspended a channel where I was uploading
educational videos about Linux-related stuff.

I remember someone submitted a bunch of DMCA requests, and at the time the
refutal process was very slow, I couldn’t prove the ownership of my videos and
the channel was suspended. Since then, every time I click the “Sign in” button
on YouTube, I get redirected to this page [1].

Recently I found a channel with videos downloaded from my channel, so I
assumed they were the ones who submitted the DMCA requests years ago. I went
ahead and pulled the same charade, I asked some of my friends to report those
videos as “offensive” and a few days later they were removed.

[1]
[https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube)

~~~
wyclif
Once Google+ for consumers is gone, what will be the state of YouTube URLs?
Let's say I want a specific URL on YT. Like, say,
www.youtube.com/user/mylastname or something like that. How can I obtain that
after April 2nd?

------
skybrian
I haven't found a good alternative yet. There doesn't seem to be a consensus.

Ideally I'd like a place where people can subscribe without being my friend,
you don't need to jump through hoops to leave a comment, and I can moderate
the comments. (Delete if necessary.)

Traditionally that would be a blog, but I don't know how many people would
subscribe these days.

~~~
skarz
Isn't Facebook just a form of microblogging?

~~~
dredmorbius
Sort of.

One of the biggest problems with Facebook is that _most of the site is inward-
facing_. That is, unless you are _on_ and _registered with_ Facebook, you
cannot view content.

(That's a fault shared with numerous other sites, FWIW.)

Facebook may be able to pull this off, for now. Almost no site not called
"Facebook" (or its equivalent category leader) can do so -- you simply need an
overwhelming network effect _OR_ an exceptionally compelling founding cohort.

Blogs are to a near totality universally accessible, at least to read, if not
comment. That's not quite definitional, but true enough in practice to be a
category marker.

------
Gustomaximus
More generally, I feel Google should wherever possible have an exit plan for
any product they launch. Make sure the account/code systems etc can be
separated if they wish.

This big launch and plug pull are an ongoing problem and creating loss of
trust and uptake.

A good solution IMO would be to (wherever viable) let willing devs continue a
product when Google decide they are out. Be it open source the project, or
offer it to teams that worked on it if they want to continue it as a business
under a new brand.

------
PretzelFisch
It served well as a private group place to post stuff, and a nice public place
to follow others who wanted to type more then twitter allowed.

------
donohoe
Anyone know if we can expect to get "+" back as a search operator? (it used to
be, then they dropped it with Google+ launch)

~~~
thunderbong
Seriously. That's exactly the same thing that went though my mind when I read
the title.

They obsessed over the plus like crazy. Removing it from search, removing it
as the icon to open a new tab in Chrome. I still remember thinking "This is so
petty and trivial. If Google+ is so great, it'll stand on its own feet,
regardless of the number of plus signs"

------
pauljurczak
April 1st would be a much more appropriate date for this monumental screw up.

~~~
EGreg
In some time zones, your wish will come true :)

~~~
jobigoud
California is only a few hours away from the intl date changing line though.
Most of the planet is in front of it timezonewise. If they pull the plug after
4 a.m. there won't be any place left still on April 1st.

------
bootlooped
Circles was a great idea. Too bad they failed to attract many users.

~~~
Corrado
I came here to say this. I loved the idea of Circles, it makes so much more
sense than whatever Facebook is doing. I'm just sad it was attached to
Google+.

------
foo101
What is "Google+ for consumers"? Is it different from the Google+ a regular
user like me?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
No, regular users are using G+ for consumers, and that's what's shutting down,
G+ for enterprise will still be around, as an internal social platform for
employees of an organization to communicate with each other.

------
nojvek
Doesn’t Jeff Dean still use Google+ for his ramblings. How can they do this?

Honestly that is the only reason I use Google+. So I can follow a bunch of
people.

I hate Facebook, I hate twitter. It’s infested with ads.

Google+ was a great idea if google just stayed calm.

------
wtmt
Though Google is in the tracking business, the increasing lack of diversity in
social media platforms is highly disturbing. Now Facebook (with all its
platforms) is the biggest, and the next is...who? Probably a limited service
with a single digit share? When companies with so much money fail miserably
(and put up with lousy decisions that were known soon after the decisions were
acted upon), everyone loses. Way too much hubris is one reason for this, and
Google seems to have that in many pockets in the organization, going by how
many services it has killed in the past.

~~~
TylerE
Twitter, surely?

------
speeder
I wonder if I will get the + operator back on search, since it disappeared
searching became a huge pain in the ass, only reason I still use Google search
is because is default everywhere....

------
wyxuan
Does this imply that G+ will still live on a some kind of enterprise product
or what? I think they could have done a good job if they increased the
integration with Gmail.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes, Google+ will continue to exist for G Suite customers (enterprise), though
only accessible to other users within the G Suite domain. It will have little
similarity to the present experience, other than interface.

------
abtinf
It’s too bad g+ destroyed Reader before it died. Reader could have been just a
few development sprints away from replicating most of facebooks features.

------
tdurden
G+ has been dead for a _long_ time. Google has actually let this service stick
around much longer than others it killed with far more active users.

~~~
skybrian
A dead language is one nobody speaks. There are still some of us on Google+,
so no it's not dead yet.

I don't really get this attitude. If a web forum that most people haven't
heard of with ~100 users shut down, it would still be sad for those users.

~~~
tdurden
> If a web forum that most people haven't heard of with ~100 users shut down,
> it would still be sad for those users.

I agree. I was really referring to G+ being even a remote competitor to FB,
which it never was. It is definitely a loss to see it go, but not unexpected.

~~~
mcv
They shouldn't have tried to make it defeat FB. They should have let it be its
own thing. For a while, Google+ was far superior to Facebook or Twitter, even
if less people were using it. They should have stuck with that.

~~~
Kye
It was a different era. All the marketing press was talking about how focused
search, like Amazon and Facebook's own search systems, would be the death of
Google. They seemed to believe it.

------
valtism
I appreciate that they are willing to pull the plug on something like this
early in order to stop potential data breaches when they can see that they
don't have to tools to reliably prevent them. I feel like many other companies
would not take these risks into account and instead keep their services
running until a major breach did happen.

~~~
mcv
As far as I can tell, the data breach is merely an excuse to pull the plug. I
don't think anything remotely serious was leaked, certainly not in comparison
to Facebook or other leaks.

------
ggambetta
Pour one out for Emerald Sea.

------
tonymet
for a while Google + was a great place to get news and updates without garbage

------
hema_n
It is very sad that Google+ is going to shut down.

------
thosakwe
My real question is what this means for OAuth.

------
dredmorbius
I've been a long time user, and critic, of Google+. Now I'm helping those who
want to move off it to find new homes, which has been interesting in itself.

I'd previously measured active public G+ posting activity, by way of the
site's own Sitemap files. Stone Temple Consulting expanded those methods to
show that:

* 91% of all G+ profiles (2.2 billion at the time) had never posted publicly.

* About 5% (110 million) profiles showed _some_ public posting activity, other than YouTube (a factor that had inflated apparent activity markedly).

* About 6.5 million profiles (0.3%) had over 50 posts ever.

* About 3.5 million profiles (0.16%) had over 50 posts _and_ activity within the previous 30 days.

That from March of 2015, based on a very large sample of 500,000 randomly
selected profiles, using methods I'd developed a few months earlier.

More recently I've been looking at G+ communities, on which there'd been
virtually no quantifiable information. There are over 8 million of these,
though the vast majority have few members and little activity: the 45%ile
membership is 1, the mode is 2, the mean around 130, itself far above the
95%ile (118.5).

There are 66 communities of 1 million or more members, 1,100 > 100k, 10,044 >
10k, 64,775 > 1k, and 390,390 > 100\. I've found vital communities across
these size ranges, with over 100,000 having 100+ members and activity within
seven days prior to accessing, over January 5-6, 2019.

Bigger isn't necessarily better. Looking at interactions (posts, comments,
plus-ones, shares) by community, _size matters little_. It's the _posting_
activity that drives other engagement, and the per-member engagement tends to
peak between about 100 and 3,000 members.

Many of those communities are looking to move elsewhere, as are other G+ users
and less formal social or other groups. Among the frustrations Google has
thrown at them, the two leading official Google+ Community-focused
communities, Google+ Moderators and Google+ Aspire, were shut down by Google
before most communities had really started addressing migration. In the case
of the first, _Google shut down the community for six weeks without any
notice,_ with users posts sitting in limbo "held for review", but appearing as
if they'd been posted by the author. In the second case, an 80,000 member
community focused on Community leaders was shut down without any prior notice.

There are several places Plussers can go for information and coordination.

The Google+ Mass Migration community, over 4,000 members since 8 October 2018,
is the central discussion point on the site itself:
[https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772/](https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772/)

There are numerous off-G+ rallying points, with the /r/plexodus on Reddit
specifically aimed at the migration process itself:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus](https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus)

And there's a Wiki with extensive information, including FAQs, planning
guides, platform comparisons, data migration information, and directories of
users, communities, and off-G+ meeting points, and more. Much a work in
progress, but again, useful to those migrating off the platform:
[https://social.antefriguserat.de](https://social.antefriguserat.de)

Links to many other communities, sites, and resources are included at all the
above.

I'm finding the process and prospect of moving some ... not entirely clear
number of users ... off a dying platform and onto new homes a hugely
interesting prospect. There's an opportunity to break out of the surveillance
capitalism disinformation monopolist mold, and also risks. I've found out a
tremendous amount about developments over the past 5-10 years in online,
social, and user-generated media, been digging back through history,
discovering I'm in close contact with some very knowledgeable people (a key
Project Xanadu member has been in my Google circles for years, I've just
learnt), and more.

And there's a lot we're sorting out about what a migration process entails and
requires, and the distinctions between succesful migrations and failures. I
see this being useful to others in the future, possibly sooner than we might
expect.

Interesting times.

~~~
tomjen3
We use(d) G+ for our family, what would you suggest as a new home? I don't
need a replacement for twitter, so I am not interested in mastodon, etc.

~~~
dredmorbius
As we're taking a position as one of the information sources and leaders, the
official position of G+MM / Plexodus is _we do not recommend a specific site_.
We'll help point you at options though.

For now, _especially_ if you've not yet decided or explored: _Go with
something basic, tried, true, known, that works, and is stable._ For groups,
mailing lists, a blog (an excellent beacon site), wiki, groups tools (Google
Groups, Yahoo Groups, Groups.io), or group-oriented discussions such as
Reddit, are all excellent choices.

 _Non-public destinations_ will hugely _reduce_ your online visibility, and if
your group depends on being findable, is probably _not_ a good idea. This is
only one of many criticisms which could be leveled against sites such as MeWe
-- along with its closed, proprietary, financially questionable, and morally
deplorable organisation, as well as a community that can only be classified as
sick and dysfunctional.

 _Bad communities tend to get worse._

Actually, _most_ communities tend to get worse. _Really_ good ones will be
watered down as they regress toward the mean. Facebook was once _literally
Harvard_ , something it no longer is. _Bad_ ones _will tend to drive off both
exceptional, and eventually, typical /normal users._ Only the die-hard misfits
and sociopaths, or those with no other options, remain. This is much as is the
case with physical-world communities as well.

And if you want to dedicate yourself to being _and remaining_ Harvard, you're
going to have to accept the fact that you're not a node but a pipe -- a
channel through which a large number of highly-selected members are recruited
on a constant basis, and eventually graduate to other activities or sites
(though with a retention of some as elders/teachers, and some ongoing alumni
relations). This is effectively the university model, and can prove quite
stable over time. There are other similar organisations -- militaries also
operate on a constant-recruitment basis, as do some commercial firms. The pre-
industrial city survived largely on in-migration, with greater financial
opportunities, but also an often staggeringly short life-expectency on
immigration. The difference between the university and pre-industrial city
model is that the first _improves_ and _expands_ the options and opportunities
of its recruits, the latter grins them up and spits them out.

(See for example, Gregory Clark, _A Farewell to Alms_ , or Ed Glaeser's works,
on preindustrial urban experiences, demographics, life expectency,
opportunity, etc.)

Back to your question: "How should we choose?" is a FAQ:

∙ Discuss or research your contacts', friends' and associates' plans. Where
your social group goes will be the most significant determinant, generally.

∙ Pick a site or platform that exists and is viable NOW. If at all possible,
that has some years of proven history.

∙ Distinguish between "skin" and "bone" factors. It's the deep and integral
features of a site, its bones, that have the biggest impact on its long-term
trends. Topical skin elements, such as site layout, mobile app, etc., can be
improved (if poor) or hide many deeper issues (if flashy).

∙ Consider the business, business model, trust, reliability, and community.
These are all bone factors that can have tremendous impacts on a site or
platform. They tend not to change radically, and rarely improve, if not
currently good or viable.

∙ Preserve your future options. Decisions now that don't lock you into a
single choice are likely best.

∙ Think of your own goals. What do you want or need to get out of your social
media / online experience? Do you simply need private chat? Public visibility?
Microblogging? Social networking? A full blog? Something more complex? Simple
tools like SMS chat, instant messenger apps, email, RSS, and blogs remain
surprisingly effective.

∙ Does the option give you control over your own data? Having to move your
content, contacts, photos, and other online data is painful, slow, and
possibly expensive. Insuring against having to do this again may be valuable.

∙ Privacy, cost, complexity, accessibility, and usefulness all deserve
consideration. Think of what you care for and what you don't want. Add other
concerns you may have.

As you look at your goals, your circle's plans (or lack), the options, and
what you do and don't want from them, you should find your options narrowing
to a few possibilities. It's all but certain these won't address all your
wants. But they should address basic needs and not present showstoppers.

[https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/FAQ#Q:_How_should...](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/FAQ#Q:_How_should_I.2Fwe_choose.3F)

------
EGreg
WHY! What do they lose by keeping it up?

~~~
toper-centage
It has serious security risks that are too expensive to fix for a useless
project?

~~~
EGreg
Like what?

------
js4ever
I guess no one will really regret Google+

------
ArrayList
And nothing of value was lost.

------
jamescostian
The date signals that on April 1st (aka April Fool's day), Google will
announce that they're resurrecting Google+

~~~
mikejb
They'll announce a completely new product: G++.

~~~
briandear
Or maybe G#?

~~~
omgtehlion
that's microsoft's shtick

------
keyle
At least this time they waited a really long time before pulling the plug. So
no one is having a big tanty.

