

Google Moderator is shutting down on June 30, 2015 - daw___
https://www.google.com/moderator/

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DannyBee
Moderator is relatively unheard of because it was created by one person as a
20% project, became popular internally, but less so externally. I ended up
owning it for most of its life (it was a team of 3 people at one point)

Externally, we mainly used it for civics related stuff, though it saw some
serious popularity in niche areas (like people using it to do youtube videos +
questions), and was, in fact, in the accelerating growth phase when it was
deprecated years ago, and we essentially cut off new external usage.

Because of how it was being used, despite being deprecated, it was kept
running for many years to make sure people could find or build alternatives.

(Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my
projects have had good shutdown plans :P)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my
> projects have had good shutdown plans

Ironically, I think there is a connection between the first part and the last
part: Google usually has well-announced shutdowns with good shutdown plans
with long migration-out periods, which results in Google shutdowns spending a
_lot_ of time in the public eye (when they are first announced, when various
milestones hit, and as they are in their final period), which magnifies the
attention around Google product shutdowns and the impression of their
significance.

OTOH, its also one of the reasons I'm very comfortable using Google products
-- any product can get shutdown if its not doing well enough (and a company
that won't voluntarily shutdown products that aren't contributing will find
itself shutting down along with its products), but at least Google usually
does a good job of handling shut downs.

~~~
asdf333
> and was, in fact, in the accelerating growth phase when it was deprecated
> years ago, and we essentially cut off new external usage.

Would you mind elaborating why it was shut down if it had accelerating usage?
seems like a good reason to keep it going instead of shutting it down to the
public...

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paulsutter
Google used this internally to manage questions at their all-hands meetings,
letting the audience upvote good questions and avoid unimportant questions.
Are there any other good solutions?

It's a real problem at conferences: many of the "questions" asked during the
Q&A at public meetings are a waste of time, a chance to show off [1].

I found an example of Yik Yak used for this purpose [2]

[1] [http://vooza.com/videos/conference-q-
and-a/](http://vooza.com/videos/conference-q-and-a/)

[2] [http://www.theconglomerate.org/2015/03/i-have-seen-the-
futur...](http://www.theconglomerate.org/2015/03/i-have-seen-the-future-of-
conference-qa-and-the-future-is-yik-yak.html)

~~~
komo
Google Moderator was built before the smartphone era and noone was really
working on it since.

We have been solving many of the issues of Google Moderator with
[http://www.sli.do](http://www.sli.do). Even some Google offices have been
using sli.do at their events instead of the moderator.

~~~
DannyBee
"Google Moderator was built before the smartphone era and noone was really
working on it since.'

This is not really accurate, though i guess it depends on what you consider
the smartphone era.

~~~
komo
Thanks for your great comments Danny. What I meant is that the moderator was
not really optimized for mobile as it was built before smartphones became
dominant.

It was still a solid product, that just became a bit "old" as technology
progressed. As mentioned in several comments here, better alternatives (incl
sli.do) are now available.

~~~
DannyBee
"What I meant is that the moderator was not really optimized for mobile as it
was built before smartphones became dominant."

Actually, we had a new mobile UI built in ~2010, and tested it at various
conferences and in various other products.

The truth was the product wasn't going to do well outside of some niches,
because the large content providers wanted something they could either
control, or that was just more popular even if it wasn't a good fit (IE CNN/et
al wanted facebook/twitter for their on-air shows, and were okay with hiring
full time people to do curation)

So, yeah, mobile didn't really kill moderator, despite your claims.

~~~
komo
Interesting, didn't know that.

I just heard some of our clients that were using Moderator before that they
switched because of the mobile UI. Was it ever available for public?

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javery
I have no clue what this is but I am shocked and appalled that Google would
shut it down.

~~~
MCRed
I give credit to Google for publicly announcing the shutdown and doing so in
advance. (Unlike amazon that just rips products out of the site. Can't go
there to find movie times anymore!)

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hansjorg
Never heard of this before. For anybody else wondering, it seems to be a more
structured version of the IAmA subreddit.

~~~
thrownaway2424
It was used for a US presidential election debate in 2008 and 2012. But other
than influencing the course of human history it has enjoyed little traction.

~~~
hansjorg
Yes, what joy to witness such exquisite debate by those enlightened orators
and masters of rhetoric. Truly something for the ages.

~~~
DannyBee
It was also used for the egyptian constitution :)

~~~
donnahanafi
Really? haha. How cool, do you have any links?

~~~
DannyBee
Some of the blog posts have died. General details are linked from footnotes in
[http://www.yjil.org/docs/pub/39-1-comment-randolph-the-
revol...](http://www.yjil.org/docs/pub/39-1-comment-randolph-the-
revolutionary-spirit-in-egypt.pdf)

One of the moderator series is at:
[https://www.google.com/moderator/?hl=ar#15/e=581e0&t=581e0.4...](https://www.google.com/moderator/?hl=ar#15/e=581e0&t=581e0.40&f=581e0.6a1891)

Note that moderator is not only available in a ton of languages, it can do
auto-translation between all language pairs google translate supports.

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ommunist
I have seen it only once. It was used for Obama's election campaign and they
reached me with Google moderator. As it usually is, they did not even care, am
I American citizen or not. Default country, what can I say.

~~~
GauntletWizard
Funny story: When you saw it, it was scheduled for shutdown. They had an
announcement all planned and were ready to start turning it down, and then
they delayed it so that Obama could use it for his campaign.

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tosh
What are some alternatives? I know [https://www.sli.do/](https://www.sli.do/).
Anything else?

~~~
wffurr
The big one is Reddit AMA:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA](http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA)

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aburan28
Oh wow, Google shuts down another service that all of its competitors could
not possibly have launched themselves.

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aikah
Never used it or heard of it. It seems like a usefull tool though, so how
come?

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Buetol
Now, let's save the precious data hosted on moderator.

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miket
Here's a list of services Google has shut down:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discont...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services)

