Yes.

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Yes.

Originally shared by Chris Jenkins

What the hell has happened to this platform?

I've been a big fan of Plus since the very beginning, and an outspoken supporter. I've met countless amazing people here, made a few really awesome IRL friends, and have thoroughly enjoyed the content creation and dissemination tools put out there. But even I, rabid Plusophile as I am, can't ignore that the platform has changed significantly, and mostly for the worse.

Public Hangouts were the root of many our conversations, and helped drive new connections on the network.

Google removed them.

Integrated events were how I coordinated kick ass HIRL's, and how I met a bunch of you fine folks IRL.

Google removed them.

The interface, while never perfect, was light, fast, and made it easy to have quality conversations. Now, it's slow, bloated, and prone to fuckery like what is shown in the gif below.

When Vic Gundotra was running this show, it was a passion project, and the integration into all the other services, along with the easy and ready access to many of the Google folks, showed that. I posted dozens of times a day from the readily accessible +Chris in my gmail inbox.

Google removed that.

Sharing AV content was a snap, and heavy integration meant that our YouTube shares and photo albums got high traffic from lots of sources which we never would have had sharing on any other social network.

Google removed that.

So many of the founding team that made this such a kick ass network are now gone. Maybe they've moved on to other things organically, but I can't help but wonder if that move wasn't driven by senior management's seeming cold shoulder to the product. We laughed at every RIP post from every half ass tech blog, but hell, no one even mentions Plus anymore, and that seems even worse.

God damn, Google management. You built a helluva network. Why the hell are you letting it rot on the vine?

No disrespect to the current dev team. I know you guys are doing your best to meet your objectives, I just wonder what those objectives are. Once, I swore it was fostering a better content creation network. Now, I'm not so sure.

Comments

Ben “The Blenster” Hibben said…
I have to agree they've neutered it a bit too much.  I miss most of those features.
April 7, 2016 at 9:57 PM
Jason ON said…
Same here. I think the idea was to make it "simpler," by what made the Ploos great wasn't how simple it could be, but the people who came here.
April 8, 2016 at 7:40 AM
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