It doesn't help that half of HN and I guess other communities as well decided to blame Google+ the social network for everything that was bad:
- linking their accounts (yep, bad)
- shuttering Reader (didn't care personally but I really doubt they calculated how much it would cost them in goodwill)
- etc
... and decided to use Google+ the social network as a target for all that frustration.
Google+ was really nice. And I'm gonna miss it.
Twitter? The place where I need to have 5 accounts to avoid spamming someone with things they don't care about?
Facebook? The place that 1.) Tries to make everything everyone puts into it public and 2.) makes large scale data harvesting possible and then say "didn't see that coming" after CA.
I've since been on Whatsapp (until Facebook bought it and destroyed the single reason why I was a walking billboard for it,) and later Telegran (don't like it either and I won't write anything there I cannot comfortably send on a postcard, but at least it is not proven yet that they will mine every ounce of metadata out of my connections and then try to kill me with spam, (including on my 2-factor address like Facebook will).
Mastodon? I don't know. Haven't tried yet. It might be brilliant but when I first heard about it it was presented as a twitter thingy and twitter is one of the more useless services I have a relationship with (of course, this is personal, for everyone who likes twitter that is more power to them I guess.)
People blame Google+ for that because Google branded all of that as Google+. At the time, Google+ invaded and occupied almost all Google properties, including YouTube (which was independent enough to resist part), Blogger (which resisted some), Reader (destroyed solely to remove Google+ competition), Hangouts, even Google OAuth
That doesn't make prevent the social network with the same name from being good though, although ironically the fact that it never became as popular as Facebook might have been part of why it stayed so nice for so long.
- linking their accounts (yep, bad)
- shuttering Reader (didn't care personally but I really doubt they calculated how much it would cost them in goodwill)
- etc
... and decided to use Google+ the social network as a target for all that frustration.
Google+ was really nice. And I'm gonna miss it.
Twitter? The place where I need to have 5 accounts to avoid spamming someone with things they don't care about?
Facebook? The place that 1.) Tries to make everything everyone puts into it public and 2.) makes large scale data harvesting possible and then say "didn't see that coming" after CA.
I've since been on Whatsapp (until Facebook bought it and destroyed the single reason why I was a walking billboard for it,) and later Telegran (don't like it either and I won't write anything there I cannot comfortably send on a postcard, but at least it is not proven yet that they will mine every ounce of metadata out of my connections and then try to kill me with spam, (including on my 2-factor address like Facebook will).
Mastodon? I don't know. Haven't tried yet. It might be brilliant but when I first heard about it it was presented as a twitter thingy and twitter is one of the more useless services I have a relationship with (of course, this is personal, for everyone who likes twitter that is more power to them I guess.)