#google plus

[7violetmadness7]

Google+ moment

#sonic #sonic the hedgehog #sth #knuckles #knuckles the echidna #miku #hatsune miku #rouge the bat #google plus #digital art #fan art

[thisdastampdoesnotexist]

#g+ #google+ #google plus #da stamps #deviantart stamps #stamp

[paroxsysdraw]

okay guys time to get real as fuck

#google plus #poll

[draconicrose]

One thing I miss from G+, and haven't seen any other social media website replicate, was the ability to follow a user's specific posts.

Basically, G+ had a feature called Collections, and when you posted something you'd add that post to one (or more) collections. Or not.

People could follow your entire profile, follow specific collections, or follow your profile and exclude specific collections from showing on their feed.

It was seriously cool and allowed people to follow according to interest.

#g+ #google plus #social media #tumblr

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Hey, remember the first enshittification of Google, when every single Google app got G+ awkwardly crammed into it because individual googlers’ bonuses were calculated based on how and whether they got people to use G+?

“Next week, we'll be enlisting every Googler to help shape Bard and contribute through a special company-wide dogfood,” Pichai wrote in the email to employees that was viewed by CNBC. "Dogfood" is a term used within companies to refer to a practice that includes using one's own product before launching it.

Google CEO issues rallying cry in internal memo: All hands on deck to test ChatGPT competitor Bard

#google #ai envy #chatcpt #google plus #g+ #dogfood #kpis #incentives matter

[ayakho]

The real reason I ultimately came back here is comparing and contrasting my Twitter and Tumblr feeds. Twitter is full of assholes and it turns you into an asshole with it.

To boil the problem down to its essence:

When I tab into Tumblr and refresh I see a cute pop cat meme or some cool constructivist art... or some neat cityscape art.

When I tab into Twitter I see people telling each other to kill themselves and Charlie Kirk complaining about CRT. This was the case prior to Musk as well.

Thing is, I never was a huge Tumblr nerd. I did lurk here back in the day but it was far from my primary social media interface. I'm one of the ten people who actually liked and enjoyed using Google +.

Tumblr has done with social self-moderation what Twitter was never able to do with millions of dollars into an actual moderation team: cultivate, eventually, a respectable and pro-social community that doesn't unilaterally reward mind-numbing mean-spiritedness.

It's not like this website doesn't have problems! I have noticed this website does have a sizable TERF community but, critically, because feeds are self-curated here and not fueled by an algorithm designed to promote aggressive argumentative anti-social behavior... I never see it unless I seek it out.

#Tumblr #Twitter #Google plus #social media #elon musk is a bitch #tumblr is fun #Twitter is painful

[snowthedemonfox]

tumblr is really turning into google+ 2 at this point huh. first polls and now communities when are we getting collections

#YES I KNOW TAGS EXIST BUT THEYRE DIFFERENT #arctic fox speaks #tumblr #google+ #google plus

[m-e-w-666]

if you were on google+ you were basically on tumblr but worse. i know this because it was my home

#like #imagine 2012-2016 tumblr #but way way way worse #being on tumblr is an upgrade #g+ #google+ #google plus #meposthings

[icarusbetide]

does anyone else remember being part of a hamilton musical google plus group before it shut down that regurgitated the same memes and false historical anecdotes or was that a fever dream i hallucinated

#hamilton #hamilton the musical #google plus #is that even the right name?? #how the hell did i even find the group i don't know #musical hamilton

[magemelondew]

when I was younger and still had access to Google plus (technically my first form of social media), I mainly used it for animal jam. but on one special occasion, I made a poll in a Nintendo-centered community asking who was better- sonic or Mario. obviously, Mario won, and I replied in the comments telling people to die. I was then banned from the group and then my mom found out and i was grounded.

also on Google plus, I stalked someone in an animal jam community and would make several posts trying to get their attention in said community because I wanted to be friends but had no way of actually communicating that in an orderly fashion. i then wrote a long apology after they told me to stop. we did not become friends.

Im sure there's a lot more shit I did but there's no way for me to ever find out since the platform is long gone 🤷 lol

#google plus

[rosesmanroses]

I just met my online best friend of 10 years for her birthday and it was so worth it. I don't know who needs to hear this but those are 100% real friendships and you should go see them (but always be safe).

#online friends #google plus #besties #road trip #nah we got absolutely obliterated #like sloshed #it was her bday party and we went stupid #bffl #<3

[evenstarfalls]

as someone who has only been active on twitter for like 2 months but used google+ for like 6 of my formative, formative years it's so interesting watching everything go down. It doesn't affect me that much, but I've been there before. Their impending doom is the past I had to puck myself up from. I lost so much of my online history with google+; some undeniably for the better, but all of it was pretty damn important in shaping who I became. There are people I was friends with that I don't even know how to start to find again, and there's nothing I can do because it's all gone. Even most of my screenshots from that era fell victim to a younger, more careless me, who tried to erase the past and just erased herself. All this rambling just to say; what happened to google+ was a damn tragedy, and it breaks my heart that it's happening again with twitter, and even larger and more active social media site chock full of things that can never be replaced. Back up your twitter data. Back up your screenshots. Hold on tight to your online friends. It doesn't look good.

#twitter #google+ #google plus

[werewyrms]

I remember being 16 years old and having heated, 1000+ word debates on Google+ about whether VriskaxTerezi was better as a ♥️ or a ♠️ and this memory makes me want to be vaporized

#vrisrezi #google plus #i am so fucking that was all scrubbed from reality #homestuck #we were all just angry lesbians

[menheraboypussy]

this one's a signal boost type of post. Nothing important though

So I'm in the mood to connect with people who have used Google plus. If you're ever lurking my account and have used Google plus, hit me up 👍. Don't follow if you're not feeling my account, but if you like it why not

Also this a mild request for mutuals and followers, reblog this so other g+ guys can see. Again no push but it'd be nice if you did

#Google plus #I miss that place tbh #Kinda weird because people miss others rather than social medias 😹. Well I'm different plus it is what it is

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google's chatbot panic

The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar — even more remarkable is that Google agrees.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Microsoft has nothing to lose. It’s spent billions on Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?

There’s a delightful Mastodon thread about this, written by Dan Hon, where he compares the chatbot-enshittified front ends to Bing and Google to Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/109832788458972865

“At the front of the house, Alice found two curious characters, both search engines.

“‘I am Googl-E,’ said the one plastered in advertisements.

“‘And I am Bingle-Dum,’ said the other, who was the smaller of the two, and sported a pout, as to having fewer visitors and opportunity for conversation than the other.

“‘I know you,’ said Alice. ‘Are you to present me with a puzzle? Perhaps one of you tells the truth and the other lies?’

“‘Oh no,’ said Bingle-Dum.

“‘We both lie,’ added Googl-E.”

It just keeps getting better:

“‘This is truly an intolerable situation. If you both lie,’

“ — ‘And lie convincingly,’ added Bingle-Dum — 

“‘Yes, thank you. If that is so, then how am I to ever trust either of you?’

“Googl-E and Bingle-Dum turned to face each other and shrugged.”

Chatbot search is a terrible idea, especially in an era in which the web is likely to fill up with vast mountains of AI bullshit, the frozen gabble of stochastic parrots:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Google’s chatbot strategy shouldn’t be adding more madlibs to the internet — rather, they should be figuring out how to exclude (or, at a minimum, fact-check) the confident nonsense of the spammers and SEO creeps.

And yet, Google is going all-in on chatbots, with the company CEO ordering an all-hands scramble to cram chatbots into every part of the googleverse. Why on earth is the company racing Microsoft to see who can be first to leap off the peak of inflated expectations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

I just published a theory in The Atlantic, under the title “How Google Ran Out of Ideas,” where I turn to competition theory to explain Google’s sweaty insecurity, an anxiety complex that the company has been plagued by nearly since its inception:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/

The core theory: a quarter of a century, the Google founders had one amazing idea — a better way to do search. The capital markets showered the company in money, and it hired the very best, brightest, most creative people it could find, but then it created a corporate culture that was incapable of capitalizing on their ideas.

Every single product Google made internally — except for its Hotmail clone — died. Some of those products were good, some were terrible, but it didn’t matter. Google — a company that cultivated the ballpit-in-the-lobby whimsy of a Willy Wonka factory — couldn’t “innovate” at all.

Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it. The company desperately wants to be a “making things” company, but it’s actually a “buying things” company. Sure, it’s good at operationalizing and scaling products, but that’s table-stakes for any monopolist:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/technical-excellence-and-scale

The cognitive dissonance of a self-styled “creative genius” whose true genius is spending other people’s money to buy other people’s products and take credit for them drives people to do truly bonkers thing (as any Twitter user can attest).

Google has long exhibited this pathology. In the mid-2000s — after Google chased Yahoo into China and started censoring its search-results and collaborating on state surveillance — we used to say that the way to get Google to do something stupid and self-destructive was to get Yahoo to do it first.

This was quite a time. Yahoo was desperate and failing, a graveyard of promising acquisitions that were gutshot and left to bleed out right there on the public internet as the dueling princelings of Yahoo senior management performed a backstabbing Medici LARP that had them competing to see who could sabotage the others. Going into China was an act of desperation after the company was humiliated by Google’s vastly superior search. Watching Google copy Yahoo’s idiotic gambits was baffling.

Baffling at the time, that is. As time went by and Google slavishly copied other rivals, its pathology of insecurity revealed itself. Google repeatedly failed to make a popular “social” product, and as Facebook commanded an ever-larger share of the ad-market, Google made a full-court press to compete with it. The company made Google Plus integration a “key performance indictator” for every division, and the result was a bizarre morass of ill-starred “social” features in every Google product — products that billions of users relied on for high-stakes operations, which were suddenly festooned with “social” buttons that made no sense.

The G+ debacle was truly incredible: some G+ features and integrations were great and developed loyal followings, but these were overshadowed by the incoherent, top-down insistence of making Google a “social-first” company. When G+ collapsed, it totally imploded, and the useful parts of G+ that people had come to rely upon disappeared along with the stupid parts.

For anyone who lived through the G+ tragicomedy, Google’s pivot to Bard — a chatbot front-end for search results — is grimly familiar. It’s a real “die a hero or live long enough to become a villain moment.” Microsoft — the monopolist that was only stayed from strangling Google in its cradle by the trauma of its antitrust dragging — has transformed from a product-creation company to an acquisitions and operations company, and Google is right behind it.

Just last year, Google laid off 12,000 staffers to please a private-equity “activist investor” — in the same year, it declared a $70b stock buyback, extracting enough capital to pay those 12,000 Googlers’ salaries for the next 27 years. Google is a financial company with a sideline in adtech. It has to be: when your only successful path to growth requires access to the capital markets to fund anticompetitive acquisitions, you can’t afford to piss off the money-gods, even if you have a “dual share” structure that lets the founders outvote every other shareholder:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/

ChatGPT and its imitators have all the hallmarks of a tech fad, and are truly the successor to last season’s web3 and cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps. One of the clearest and most inspiring critiques of chatbots comes from science fiction writer Ted Chiang, whose instant-classsic critique was called “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

Chiang points out a key difference between the output of ChatGPT and human authors: a human author’s first draft is often an original idea, badly expressed, while the best ChatGPT can hope for is a competently expressed, unoriginal idea. ChatGPT is perfectly poised to improve on the SEO copypasta that legions of low-paid workers pump out in a bid to climb the Google search results.

Speaking of Chiang’s essay in this week’s episode of the This Machine Kills podcast, Jathan Sadowski expertly punctures the ChatGPT4 hype bubble, which holds that the next version of the chatbot will be so amazing that any critiques of the current technology will be rendered obsolete:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/232-400-hundred-years-of-capitalism-led-directly-to-microsoft-viva-sales

Sadowski notes that OpenAI’s engineers are going to enormous lengths to ensure that the next version won’t be trained on any of the output from ChatGPT3. This is a tell: if a large language model can produce materials that are as good as human-produced text, then why can’t the output of ChatGPT3 be used to create ChatGPT4?

Sadowski has a great term to describe this problem: “Habsburg AI.” Just as royal inbreeding produced a generation of supposed supermen who were incapable of reproducing themselves, so too will feeding a new model on the exhaust stream of the last one produce an ever-worsening gyre of tightly spiraling nonsense that eventually disappears up its own asshole.

This is the last day (Feb 17) of my Australian tour for my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’ll be in Canberra at the Australian Digital Alliance Copyright Forum.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Tweedledee and Tweedledum, standing at the bottom of Humpty Dumpty's wall. Dee and Dum have the logos for Google and Bing on their chests. Humpty is about to fall and is being held up by a motley collection of panicking businessmen."]

#competition #monopoly #google #china #yahiko #chatbots #generative ai #bard #chatgpt #microsoft #innovation #psychoanalysis #google plus #pluralistic

[chillincreative]

Do you think Elon Musk bought Google+ in an alternate timeline?

#google plus #awfulposting