1613 points by Nemant 2701 days ago | 699 comments on HN
| Mild positive
Contested
Policy · v3.7· 2026-02-28 10:27:40 0
Summary Data Privacy & Protection Advocates
Google announces Project Strobe, a comprehensive data governance initiative centered on 'Protecting your data' through API restrictions and platform discontinuation. The content strongly advocates for privacy protection and user data security, implementing concrete structural changes. However, the unilateral corporate approach to policy change, combined with Google's underlying business model centered on behavioral tracking, creates tension between the stated privacy advocacy and systemic commercial practices.
Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.
The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.
Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.
LOL, one more example of why one should never depend on anything from Google.
developer adoption
Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?
G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).
Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.
> Google is shutting down its long-neglected Facebook competitor Google+ following the disclosure of a vulnerability that could have resulted in third-party developers accessing private data from around 500,000 users, the company announced Monday.
Google+ was a top-down, scrambling response to Facebook's meteoric rise. I think it ultimately failed because it didn't naturally mesh with or arise from Google's natural strengths.
Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)
Funny how they low-key slip through, the fact that they had an open security vulnerability for 3 years. Like "Hey, we are shutting down Google+ ... Btw, your data may have or may have not been exposed..."
This is Vic Gundotra's legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Google+ and (IMHO) it marked a turning point in the company's culture.
Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when "herding cats" is so often much closer to the truth. In G+'s case, the rank-and-file was largely against things like the Real Names policy yet leadership went ahead with it anyway (Vic often quipped that you didn't want everyone named "Dog fart", which was a pretty ridiculous argument).
And while it may have been Vic driving this, Larry backed him so has to bear shared responsibility.
Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. Youtube accounts have different permission models to Gmail accounts, etc. It would've been sufficient to simply link them (and not require they be linked) rather than jamming single-sign-on down everyone's throats, which really gained nothing except a lot of user backlash.
The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).
I was reminded of this in a thread yesterday about the disaster that was the Snapchat redesign. Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision (people have a tendency to socialize losses and privatize wins). Is this merely hubris? Because it's very reminiscent of the dismissal of internal feedback that is now routine (at Google).
It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great.
Still, as the Chinese say, the fish rots from the head.
Disclaimer: Xoogler. All opinions are entirely personal and I don't speak for this or any other company.
I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well.
I was also thinking about the recent love letter to Google that came across here about Google Cloud. In it was the admission that Google tried to hard to "copy" or "follow" AWS in the early years.
Allo, Inbox, Gchat, Reader, Wave, Etc. It feels like they are trying to hard to be "amazing" and missing out on just being good at what they do. Meanwhile the beat of the jungle drums, "More ads, more ads, more ads..." continues on relentlessly.
[1] Inside there were good projects that got killed because they either conflicted with or competed with G+, outside the company it seemed Google was deathly afraid of Facebook and Twitter and had no credible answer, their real names fiasco, their forcing of people to use G+ if they used other services, all of it damaged the Google brand and user trust.
The reports of Google avoiding making a security disclosure about the potential data breach out of concern for negative PR and regulatory response are very concerning and should be getting more attention
Lots of people here talking about the good bits of Google+ or how they could have made it succeed. But from my POV it was just the wrong idea from the start. From what I saw Google panicked about the growth of Facebook and Twitter and tried to build a competitor. But no one wanted more social networks. And Google didn’t have a compelling story about how they were better. Instead it was just a bunch of user hostile changes—forced linking of accounts, elimination of stuff like Reader—and Google seemed to be forcing itself into parts of your digital life where it wasn’t welcome. I’m glad they’re able to admit it’s a failure now even though it took several years too long and this silly excuse about a privacy review.
What's really striking about this to me is that Google didn't disclose the security vulnerability. Google is trying to cover it up by moving the ball from 'there was a breach' to 'we're shutting down G+'. This is why I'm super hesitant to be a Google fanboy. Facebook may have my social media info, but Google has my emails, all of my mobile data, access to a bunch of my assets through Google Domains, GCE etc. Scary stuff.
Google+ sunsetting is sad news, as I've actually used it fairly actively. (and I have a few dozens of people I interact regularly who I wouldn't have known if not from G+!)
It somewhat acted like a better version of Twitter for me, where I can write a lot more on the post, and actually engage a meaningful discussion with people.
I don't know, even with relaxed character counts on Twitter that it will accommodate same use cases, and I don't like to use Facebook for this purpose as I really don't want introduce a total stranger as my friend...
I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts.
That immediately stopped me posted anything. It's almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It's too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good 'circles' but I'm pretty sure that like me, everyone else stopped.
Now, I have to figure out a way of re-importing all that content to something else, probably homebrewed this time.
From my perspective, the one thing Google got _really_ wrong with G+ was their APIs. When G+ was launched, tools like TweetDeck were heavily used for interacting with Twitter, Facebook and the like. All of a sudden along came a service that had no APIs by which you could post to it. Something you needed to specifically go and open a separate application for.
If they'd made public read & write APIs from the start, they could have picked up a massive initial user base as people used the tools they were already actively using. You've got to either:
1) Offer an amazingly compelling product with features that provide _significant_ reasons for people to compel people to use you
2) Go to where people are, and bring them to you.
G+ failed on both scores. It had good features, but they weren't _that_ compelling.
This sucks. The vibrant RPG community on Google+ is in uproar about this and looking for a suitable alternative. (MeWe looks like the most likely candidate at the moment.)
Google+ started out as the best social network. Unfortunately Google has taken every opportunity to ruin it, remove popular features, force ill-considered integration, remove that integration once people are used to it. Lately the spam filtering has been utterly broken, alternating between leaving painfully obvious spam, and marking and hiding comments from people you were following. It seemed like it was an experimental testbed for them where they didn't care if people were using it.
Despite all of that, we hung on because of the great communities, the people we got to know, and because frankly there's no good alternative.
It really seems to me it shouldn't be too hard at this point to design a sane social network. Google+ had all the elements, but refused to apply them correctly.
Facebook is a horrible mess of privacy violations with no control over your feed (though G+'s control often doesn't work as intended either), and besides, there's family and co-workers there. Twitter seems designed for screaming into the void. Tumbler and Instagram don't seem to be my thing.
It's going to be very interesting to see where all the tabletop gaming people land. G+ got a lot of pickup in that hobby because the early API blended tools, like Hangouts with overlays and easily segmented discussion groups, that worked well with online tabletop gaming. Roll20 integrated well with G+ (at least until Google killed the Hangouts API in April 2017).
The early adopters reached enough of a critical mass that others used it solely because of who was already there, making it an actual social network for at least that purpose.
Much like when Reader folded, G+'s critical mass is going to spread out to a half-dozen other places and refragment. And like Reader's exit, there's a vacuum right now for someone to jump in with something better and charge a nominal amount for it.
RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle.
Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.
This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.
Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.
Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social. This is at the time FB is bleeding heavily, is losing trust and people are willing to try something new. Google is one case where it looks like outside traditional CEO Eric Schmidt did much much better not only in operational excellence but also long term big bets including maps, gmail, YouTube, Android etc. Larry Page has nothing comparable to show for in his 7 years of leadership. This might be one reason: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-13/larry-pag...
I think that was by design. Trying to sweep it under the covers to avoid outrage. I share that article with friends and they're likely to read the first half of the headline and not bother reading it.
came here to say just that. the gall of google, claiming at the release of g+, that '+' was never an official qualifier and quotes were always the standard.
There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunities more visible.
Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like.
It's clear that it failed. It's less clear that the reason is necessarily any of the ones you gave. Every dominant social network has been a walled garden, and, contrariwise, every attempt to create a major social network based around federation and open standards has, so far, failed.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one succeed, and who knows, maybe Mastodon will overtake Facebook one day, but I don't see any evidence in the Google+ shutdown that suggests that this is the case.
Common "business as usual" technique. In a previous small company I used to work at, often when a senior engineer was leaving, the departure announcement email was mentioned as a last thing after a couple of "good news" announcements.
As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure.
This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.
I think they are trying to spin it as a privacy-protecting move. This gains them two things:
1. They save face a little by not publicly confessing it was a failure.
2. Big tech (Facebook, Google, etc.) is facing privacy-related criticism right now. They can say, hey, this is yet one more step we're taking to improve the situation for everyone.
And they might even be partially right about both. Maybe they would have shut it down eventually but privacy challenges caused them to do it sooner than they otherwise would have.
G+ has been a laughingstock in terms of actual usage numbers for years. Nobody is using it. The fact that it was still supported is amazing. Is Google supposed to support failing products until the end of time?
I think that's the bigger issue here. For 3 years there was a vulnerability. And when they did find out about it, they chose not to disclose the information. Why? B/c there wasn't that many people using it. And so because of that, let's shut down G+, rather than be scrutinized about how they chose not to let it be know, that users information were available through this vulnerability.
>Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was trying to unify the account model.
Trying it at all after realizing it was not going to be complete. I think the unified account was an all-or-nothing strategy, and they met with early resistance from every dedicated user silo on all of their previously very separate products.
But instead of launching some big unified account thing to really force Google+, they did a kind of half-assed thing. Some accounts migrated and auto-signed up, there were some weird account-links, people had multiple accounts (youtube, gmail) etc etc. They backed out, pandered, etc. It was an absolute shit-show from the perspective of a power user.
If someone would have had the prescience to say "our products are too silod for a successful merger" at the onset, and then either spent 5 years slowly breaking down those silos FIRST, or just tearing the walls down AT ALL, it might have worked.
> I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can't search you own posts.
I left Google Plus after Google Search kept turning up private posts that I had opted to remove from search.
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.)
It failed in my case because it polluted every other Google property - search, YouTube suggestions, etc. I'd prefer that suggestions and search results be based on my preferences and not those of an idiot cousin or a foaming-at-the-mouth prepper I happen to work with.
This is not a news article, though - it's a one-sided PR piece that greatly minimizes important points about the story and completely ignores other points (e.g. the regulation angle). You should have let another news story take its spot; there are plenty others that are not paywalled.
Exactly the same here. I made friends there (not like on most other networks where you 99% add people you already know anyway) and used it for a while, and it indeed feels like a better Twitter.
I'm fine with it shutting down, though. At least I no longer have to feel like I'm missing out on anything for not using a Google product (for various reasons, one of them being that it might be cancelled any minute).
They keep moving the functionality, but I can still get to it on desktop. Search for something, "Posts" tab, change "From Everyone" dropdown to "From just you".
It seems like Google could have successfully built a "shadow social network" by incrementally integrating their popular services like Gmail, Inbox, Reader, YouTube, Hangouts, and chat into one portal. OTOH, Buzz tried to inject social sharing into Gmail and there was a big user backlash.
For a long time in Hangouts, you could hit the big green "+" to start a new conversation, and instead of searching your contacts, it would put everyone elses name EVERYWHERE in the list. So basically you had to find your contact another way.
I think they were attempting to encourage new connections, but that's not how to do it.
The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem).
it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product.
Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
> It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great.
The fairly small number of people I know who are Googlers or Xooglers are all pretty awesome as techies and as people. That does little to change my opinion of Google itself. Sometimes it makes me even more cynical, thinking that management might take special care in internal messaging lest the rank-and-file revolt.
But from my perspective, from the outside, what Google does as a company is what counts for me and for society. All the good people inside don't ameliorate the external behavior of the company.
Article title explicitly centers 'Protecting your data' as primary commitment. Mentions restricting third-party API access and sunsetting Google+ to reduce personal data exposure. Direct, unambiguous focus on privacy protection and data control.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Page title's first clause states 'Protecting your data' as explicit project objective.
Subtitle indicates 'improving our third-party APIs'—framed as restricting external access to user data.
Subtitle 'sunsetting consumer Google+' references elimination of a data-collection platform.
Article is published on Google's official Safety & Security section, establishing institutional positioning.
Inferences
Explicit naming of data protection as a core value frames privacy as a fundamental right rather than a feature.
API restrictions and platform shutdown represent structural implementation of privacy-protective policies.
Unilateral corporate announcement suggests top-down approach to privacy governance with limited user agency.
Project branding and title suggest systematic review of entire data governance model, indicating comprehensive rather than incremental change.
Data protection, particularly of health information, relates to welfare and health security. Restricting third-party access to user data reduces exposure of health information.
FW Ratio: 33%
Observable Facts
Data protection commitment includes health data protection by extension of privacy controls.
Inferences
Privacy-protective policies implicitly protect sensitive health information from unauthorized access.
Data security measures support welfare by reducing exposure of health vulnerabilities.
API restrictions mentioned may reduce third-party developers' ability to create applications and express innovation. Framed as 'improvement' but effectively restricts developer agency and expression.
API restrictions and Google+ sunset may limit developers' ability to participate in cultural/technical creativity and innovation. Unilateral policy limits ecosystem innovation.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article announces API restrictions that limit developers' ability to build innovative applications.
Shutdown of Google+ platform removes a venue for user-generated cultural participation.
Inferences
API restrictions constrain the developer ecosystem's capacity for innovation and scientific/technical contribution.
Platform shutdown eliminates a space where users could create and share cultural content.
API restrictions may impact third-party developers' ability to earn income through app development and data-dependent services. No discussion of mitigation or transition support.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article announces restrictions to third-party API access, which affects developers' ability to build profitable applications.
No visible language addressing impact on developer livelihoods or transition support.
Inferences
Unilateral API restrictions create potential economic harm to ecosystem developers without apparent remediation.
Absence of mitigation language suggests one-sided approach to policy change affecting economic rights.
Google announces concrete policy changes: API restrictions and platform shutdown. Demonstrates structural commitment to privacy through product decisions, though changes are unilateral without transparent user choice mechanism.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
Support HN HRCB
Each evaluation uses real API credits. HN HRCB runs on donations — no ads, no paywalls.
If you find it useful, please consider helping keep it running.