My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users. I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't reading sites like HN. Those people still don't use Google+, but it's because none of their friends were there, they found Circles confusing, and they didn't see any real benefit to taking the effort to learn about it. Social networks have a lot of inertia for users who aren't early adopters. If they already are connected to all of your friends on Facebook, a new social network would have to be truly amazing (or Facebook would have to really screw up, in ways that "regular people" care about) to get them to move over. I think Real Names was a drop in the bucket compared to other issues.
> I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't
> reading sites like HN.
Anecdote: a decidedly non-technical friend of mine with the last name of "Star" had his Google+ profile disabled after having his name falsely classified as a pseudonym. The only Google+ service that he actually cared about using was Hangouts (a sentiment universal among my friends, it seems... despite its faults, Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell). The end result was that he missed out on spending time with his friends because of an unanswerable algorithm attempting to enforce a dubious policy. From a user's point of view, this is incredibly frustrating.
To this day, his Google+ profile picture is the same photographic proof that he had to send in to convince them of his name's legitimacy. His rationale is that if his profile gets disabled again, he can just point to his profile picture.
When I tried to register for G+ (I only tried it because my non-tech friends pestered me .. and none of them is still using it) it told me that I was not a person but a shop. And that I should please use their shop accounts or whatever. And the only way to tell it that I was not a shop but a person was to scan in a passport, which probably would have been read by someone later who would (maybe?!) have activated my account.
I cannot even start to describe the hate I had for G+ from that moment on. It only got worse when a friend of mine used an absolute fake name to register an account without any problems. What an UI experience. And if they didn't have insisted on "real names" it wouldn't have happened.
Google is incredibly bone-headed and if there's something wrong with your account, there is generally no way to fix it.
More than ten years ago, I signed up for Adsense - it didn't work. Despite using my Google account for a ton of stuff, I kept getting obscure error messages. When they changed the interface about 3 years ago, I tried again. This time, the UI sent me into a Kafkaesque endless loop. A few months ago I tried again, this time I was put into review and haven't heard from them since. I'm certain there is some horrible, deadly flag somewhere deep in the metadata Google keeps of me, but I have no way of finding out why or what to do about it.
The frustration Google casually inflicts upon its users is infuriating, and I'm not only talking about this account stupidity.
<b>Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell</b>
My S4 updated from gtalk to hangouts, and I loathe it. It now crashes quite regularly, sometimes multiple times in a single chat session, and included a stupid button that starts a video chat on my phone, a feature I have never wanted and never will want, but manages to get fat-thumbed, or randomly turn itself on when I am trying to communicate with someone.
I should have clarified: best-in-class for what my friends and I need, which is essentially simultaneous multi-user voice chat that doesn't require installing an external program (if they have Chrome, it doesn't require installing anything at all), works on all platforms, doesn't mandate a laborious microphone calibration on first use, and has pretty decent echo cancellation. We were just looking to replace Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble, rather than e.g. looking for a replacement for Skype. It's been invaluable as a permanent place for our geographically-distributed friend group to idly loiter and connect to whenever anyone has a free moment.
The real-name policy itself was only known by a small group of people. However, the idea that G+ would be a place for a your One True Identity was directly attacking Facebook, which is not the way in which Facebook was vulnerable. If they had built the entire product (not just the real-name policy) around the idea of pseudonyms or ephemeral identities or multiple identities like Reddit, they may have found more success (but this may not have been aligned with their high-level organizational goals for building G+ in the first place).
But therein lies the problem: people clearly want Reddit. Companies succeed when they find a significant niche where their interests happen to align with that of their users / customers in a significant way. When a company starts putting its own needs ahead of its users that's a huge danger sign for its future. Google arrogantly thought that they could put their own needs first and if they just shove it hard enough at people they can win with brute force. I think that's a terrible mistake.
I'm not a Google+ user (at least not by choice), but as a redditor for 7 years that chart seems to show the correct trends (as far as reddit's growth is concerned, at least).
Ironically, Google inherited the precursor of Reddit, in the form of Google Groups, the interface to what's left of Usenet.
It's also done much to kill that -- the interface is abysmal (actually, so is G+, but that's another story). Even some early G+ support channels which were mediated through Google Groups got killed off. I'd posted some detailed feedback early on (2011) which, so far as I can tell, has been nuked from the face of teh Intarwebs.
Reddit isn't the end-all be-all, but it's damned good. And it carries far more regard and respect than its size would suggest. News items I'm reading about G+ discuss a total staff of over 1200 devoted to it (now largely being reassigned). Reddit's still in the <50 headcount as far as I know.
And yeah: I'd love to see global search (including comments), better tags, better moderation tools, a more powerful wiki, longer self-posts (10k char limit is a bear), and a bunch of other stuff, but it's really quite a useful site as things stand.
Much as HN, despite a pretty limited UI is, largely based on community and dynamics.
Reddit doesn't have photo albums or event organization or realtime video chat or a celebrity/Brand platform or product reviews or search engine integration or any sort of privacy controls or a (first-party) Android app with all these features or (for better or worse) a rich visual UI.
It's not that they should try to be Reddit -- it's that they should try something different. Big companies attack other big companies all time time, and it almost never works when the attack is head-on at the point of the competitor's greatest strength (things like Android are the exception, not the rule). The best way to attack a competitor is with a product that doesn't initially even look like a competitive offering.
Actually, I would read iPhone vs Android as not a true head to head. Androids have always trended towards budget and have generally been a shift towards allowing telecom crapware on them. Two of Apple's weaknesses. :)
Youtube is video reddit (or maybe reddit is text and image youtube). It's my understanding that youtube makes a great deal of money.
More generally, reddit is lots of user generated content that gets page views. What makes facebook's user generated content so much more attractive? The user graph? Have they figured out any good way to monetize that?
I imagine at that point, the "Google identity" dictated what kind of "Internet neighborhood" they felt they had to situate their social network in.
But thinking about it that way, it seems clear that rolling out a product based on "what Google needs to offer" rather than "what people want" is recipe for failure.
But with their ownership of Blogger and YouTube, they were far better positioned to build a Reddit/Disqus/whatever than they were to build a Facebook.
If they had started with the concept of "we're going to build a unified social layer for all our content-posting platforms and then integrate that into a Facebook-like environment" it likely would have gone far better for them than what they did, which is the reverse (build a Facebook-like environment and then use it as a unified social layer for all their content-posting platforms).
I don't use social media. Facebook, Twitter, the rest of them. So I wasn't ever a likely Google+ user. I do use Google Apps, Sites, and mail however, and what really annoyed me about Google+ and their big "identity" push was the insistence on trying to consolidate three separate Google "identities" together and sort of mush all of those things together. Those identities represent "me" in separate roles and responsibilites with separate organizations. There was no need and no desire on my part to have all of that merged under "one" Google identity. In fact I actively wanted to keep them separate. The amount of extra work I have to do to keep it that way (deleting cookies, maintaining separate browser profiles, etc.) is just needless pain they are imposing on me.
The social network hasn't gained the massive userbase it would need to rival Facebook, and the aggressive integration strategy has been universally hated by users. As Google gets bigger and bigger, it faces harsher scrutiny, and few things the company has done have been more disliked than Google+. According to the report, Google+'s YouTube takeover was seen as "a rocky move" even inside the company...
As a brand, Google+ is about at toxic as you can get.
Ouch.
As I'd previously commented answering Eric Schmidt's "My biggest mistake at Google was not anticipating social": No, Schmidt, your biggest mistake was failing to realize that vast hoards of highly detailed and categorized personal data are not only an asset, but a tremendous liability.
Even if it was that vocal minority that stopped Real Names, there were a lot of problems ahead for Google had they continued to enforce it.
Take the EU for instance. It might well be possible that, given Google's dominating position in the search and advertising markets, it is illegal in the EU for Google to _force_ people to give up an essential part of their online privacy. (Using your dominating position to force others to forego their rights.)
Usually, the EU takes some time before it gears into action, but if found at fault, the EU will make a company change its ways. So maybe somebody at Google caught the "bad vibes" coming out of Europe and decided it wasn't worth it.
"My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users"
It was also hated by people who had real names that some damn fool at Google thought were fake like Native Americans[1]. You would think with a search engine they could figure this out. I am so glad we went with Office365 because I can only imagine what would have happened when half the student body's accounts got frozen.
The Real Names policy stinks. It misses completely legitimate (and innocent) reasons why people want to be anonymous sometimes.
That said, your other point needs to be trumpeted to any companies thinking about taking a run at FB. The reality is that FB has its annoyances, but overall it is good enough that it's not worth losing all my posts, photos, etc. that have become a "life mosaic", as well as, my network of friends to move to another site - and I don't have time to maintain more than one social network. The situation reminds me of enterprise vendor apps that my employer uses. Overall a particular app may have its warts, but it covers most use cases alright so that we aren't tempted to go to a competing app.
Real Names is the best illustration of how Google tried to copy FB instead of offering a better one. "Circles"? only sound of it is already too high-brow for average Joe. Have you heard a taxi driver using word "circle" to describe his taxi driving buddies?
> My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users.
Another way of putting this is that most people don't need pseudonyms, but the people who need them really need them. Search for .e.g. "google outed me".
The thing is that these sites (as with many things) grow from a core of early tastemakers. In some circles these people know the hottest bands, the best new books, wear the coolest clothes, or know about the new restaurants in town before everyone else. In tech they know the best sites, and where they go the rest will follow. "People reading HN" might be a small minority in the grand scheme of things, but I would be willing to bet that they collectively have a huge influence on the web at large. They were the natural drivers of Google+, and they didn't bite. Meanwhile things have moved on from Facebook to Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc leaving Google+ in the dust. Do not ignore vocal and influential groups of users, even if they are small in number.
This is what happened as far as I could tell: the techie world (friends of Googlers) joined, then crashed head first into the Real Name Policy and told their friends to stay the hell away. It never recovered.
I think in the long term all the nerds, as you imply, that hated Real Names will be vindicated and it will be obvious that this enforcing people to spread their real names all over the web is a bad idea.
