I really liked the /idea/ behind google plus where you could put people into circles and selectively post to them.

- Family photos go to everyone in the family circle. - Articles about politics go to people in that circle (who might also be in my family circle) - Articles about technical topics go to people in that circle.

We all have different interests and contexts in our lives - like I might want everyone (close friends and acquaintances alike) to know I got married but only my very close family to know I got the flu last weekend.

The part (well last I used google plus which was a while ago) that was missing was sorting that the other way - so when my sister posts family photos it shouldn't show up in the 'news' group that I also have her in.

The interface for google plus sucked, but they got the right idea.

I think the idea of circles came from Diaspora.[1]

I've always suspected that Google Plus' design killed it. It was so bloated that it would barely run on my netbook with 4 GB of RAM. I think that if it had looked like Craig's List, without the gaudy Material Design animation, it would have been more successful (seriously). Google does data well and design badly.

[1] https://diasporafoundation.org/getting_started/aspects

It rapidly became clear that the burdens of curation of circles and figuring out which one to use made using GP too much effort. FB does have a mechanism like that but it's barely even known about, while the coarser "group" mechanism does seemingly 95% of what people would want out of circles.

One might consider it an example of "worse is better", though I'm not convinced.

(Wow, just checked and Google+ is still available. I'd thought it had already shut down like Orkut and Wave).

In so much as Google added to "the burden of refinement", in some ways it didn't go far enough. If someone I know posts cat videos and boardgames reviews, and adds me to both Google+ circles, how am I to subscribe to one and not the other?

This problem is bidirectional: which posts of yours will you let me see and of those, which do I want to see. But this is an even heavier ask.

I really loved the concept behind Google Plus. Really sad it didn't work out for them. I used it a lot, but it never felt quite right. Always felt "beta" and not quite polished. Which I was fine with, because I loved the idea behind partitioning my interests and social circles.

I know Facebook allows this to a certain extent, and I've set up a bunch of Facebook lists in the past. But it's much harder to use.

You can do this with Friends Lists in Facebook IIRC (I deleted my Facebook months ago), but it's not as obvious/front and center like it was on Google+

The issue with it not being front-and-center is that it's not the default modus operandi for everyone on the network. It's not just about how I'd want to share my content, but also how I want others to share theirs with me. I'm interested in my friend's adventures building a project, doing art, or starting a business, but not interested in their dog, their exotic tourism pics, or most of their romantic lives except for close friends. It would be nice if everyone I got connected to on my social media filtered me out based on what they knew of me, by default.

Would be even better if you could filter on your end. Users just tag their posts; "Pets," "Kids," "Politics," etc and then you can uncheck any tags from a friend you're not interested in, but leave the rest as-is. Maybe all checked by default but you could uncheck a tag directly on the post that bothers you.

> Users just tag their posts

"Just"?

That would be a disaster. It sounds like something that AI ought to be able to do fairly well, though, so the idea stands.

Defaults matter. A lot. I kind of wish G+ was a more successful competitor as it would have pushed FB to adopt this more thoroughly than tacking on an optional feature.

You can do that with Facebook too. You can make lists and publish posts to specific lists instead of just "Friends". You can also do "Friends except [list]" or "Friends except [person]", too.

I haven't taken much advantage of it, just some here and there. For example, there have been times I've excluded current and former coworkers (I was looking into moving out of town for a while—not anymore though—and I wanted to pick my friends' brains on suggestions for places to move to without it getting back to people I work with that I was thinking of leaving the company). Another example, when I was first beginning my gender transition and I wasn't yet out to the world, I would post about transition-related things to a list that contained the small handful of people who knew I was transitioning. And another, when my former best friend went down an extreme far-right rabbit hole and began posting bigoted statements, including using slurs, against groups that I'm part of, I a) put him and his wife on my Acquaintances list and started making 90% of my posts to "Friends except Acquaintances" and b) made a list of people I trust so I could get support for my feelings of being betrayed without tipping off him or anyone who might tell him (I stopped (a) after he deleted his Facebook account a few months ago... at that point, I threw his wife on my Restricted list, which is hardcoded to hide anything that isn't Public from people on that list).

With respect, keep in mind that your children will grow up and want to control their own social media presence.

Parents I know ask themselves, "do I have the moral right to post this photo of this (presently) small person, considering it will never go away?"

And yet, by and large, those same people fail to ask that same question in respect of grown-up persons and seem to have little hesitation in posting pictures of /them/ to social media where the pictures will also "never" go away.

Seems to me it would only be respectful to /ask first/ whether the people in some party snap are all OK with having their image posted somewhere, tagged and identified and sucked into somebody's gigantic social graph database, but this is clearly not the norm.

Yup, I'm very conscious of this. I wrote a longer comment in regards to this elsewhere in this thread.

I'm fairly similar. It's become a way to save and share family photos and stories.

That said, I find real value in that. I know what I share and save on Facebook is going to be there in 10 years, and probably will still be somewhere accessible in 50 years. Everyone pretends personal systems (where you are "in control") are safer, but I know how many photos and files I've misplaced over the years.

And Facebook encourages me to do more than just post blind photos, but also to give a story. I've looked through old photo albums, and the pictures become empty all too quickly. I could do all this on my own, but again I'll probably lose things or the stories and photos will become disassociated or some other mistake, or I'll be gone and no one will know or care to retrieve them from whatever system I've created. But even more so I need a reason to put everything together, and sharing it immediately with other people – people who show, even trivially, that they care – gives me a reason.

Facebook's Memories feature has already shown me that this is important – seeing something I shared one or five or ten years ago makes me realize these things matter to me.

Maybe other people have ways of doing disciplined documentation of their life and experiences and family that I don't. But I'm doubtful.

Have you put any consideration into the fact that your children might grow up and be rather unhappy to find out that their parents created a permanent photo/comment record of their life on the servers of an advertising corporation?

I'm glad I'm too old to have been subjected to that. Just thinking about what it would feel like to be one of those kids when they find out that they were robbed of any ability to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted that stuff out there makes my skin crawl.

Some parents I know seem to have mainly had their children for the purpose of using them as a social media fashion accessory. It's incredibly sad.

Yup, I think about that all the time. That's why I originally unfriended anyone that isn't family or a friend I know in real life who has already met my kids.

And as I learned about Facebook's (and social media's) privacy leakiness, I scrubbed my posts of all personal info (kids' birthdays, names, schools, etc) and many photos. My privacy settings are pretty tight too. In another comment, I mentioned several alternatives that I've been exploring for photo sharing - since the primary audience for these photos are grandparents, relatives, and close friends.

Unfortunately, I have a relative who's posted photos of my kids and definitely uses them as social media fashion accessories. It's lead to some awkward conversations and demands to scrub their posts of my kids.

As a side note, I've been having conversations with my oldest kid about social media. I even went through all of the photos I posted, asking if any should be removed. I already post very few photos - and when I do, I carefully curate them. My child was comfortable about all of my posts, but did feel embarrassed about a few from the relative I mentioned earlier. My child now also asks on occasion if I can take a photo and post it. Most of the time, my answer is No, and that I'd share it privately with family instead. But once in a while, I'll share it.

I've often heard of this, I understand the basic argument of removing someone's freedom.

I've managed to convince my spouse to not share many of our kids' pictures on social media due to some concerns, but I am unsure the worry about grown up people being worried about their pics as kids is justified.

Do you feel a person in the twenties or teens will be impacted by the fact that 10 years earlier their parents shared a cute picture of them?

I am trying to understand, not argue.

I feel the same way. My mom is a photographer. I still occasionally see old pictures of myself and my siblings in random articles.

I can't imagine how I could possibly be harmed by the existence of pictures of me as a kid. Yep I was once a child and photos were taken.

I made the front page of my home town paper for various minor awards a few times too. Should the newspaper have been concerned about the morality of publishing a photo I might someday object to?

There are pictures of me in hundreds of copies of people's year books too.

It's more about being fair on the kids, the only pictures of me when I was a kid was on photograph film, later digital but most pictures of my childhood are somewhere in the attic where they get taken out once every few years maybe. And while everyone can appreciate having those memories available, having instant access to them by friends and family isn't something I'd ever want as a child of my parents.

Now, I mostly read reddit for interesting articles and discussions. Some Facebook groups are decent for that, but they never quite match the reach and range of discussion that reddit does.*

I really struggled with the quality and intelligence of posts and responses on Reddit. I find them short, emotive, adolescent and generally noisy. However a lot of HN folks seem to enjoy it. What's the trick I'm missing? Finding the right subreddits, presumably?

It definitely depends on the sub.[1] You're right, many are very noisy. Startup and tech/programming subs don't quite match up to HN, so for those topics, I use HN.

[1] As an example, /r/AskHistorians/ is heavily moderated and high quality.

Yeah, default subs and the unfiltered reddit front page is awful. Just subscribe to things you really want to hear/talk about, block users who harsh your mellow and you should be fine.

The programming subreddits aren't as good as HN. I follow quite a few local subreddits (my city, Yosemite, etc).

This was exactly my experience except that I eventually left the service entirely.

>'ve begun to slow down my usage in favor of other mechanisms for sharing kids' photos.

Which mechanisms?

I'm still experimenting to find the right mix. I've tried Dropbox, Google Photos, Amazon Photos, a private site built from scratch, and a handful of paid private photo sharing sites. Haven't quite found one that I love yet, but I'm still experimenting and searching. Building a custom solution offers the most privacy, but it's hard to find the time to do it.

iMessage is my goto method for sharing kids pics these days. It’s on purpose to the people I know care and who I trust. Also private so no endless public record. And there are archived backups in the cloud. Perhaps some of my extended circle misses out this way? But it mostly seems to work.

Facebook could be reddit, if it allowed pseudonyms. The police-state-like idea of requiring real names ultimately limits its usefulness to a cohort-tracking network that grows old and eventually dies with the cohort.

I feel sorry for your kids.

> Eventually, I started weeding out people who fell below the level of a real-life friend, because I didn't want to share family photos with them. Facebook became a place to share kids' photos and see kids' photos from friends and family.

I'm fairly sure that the opposite is also occurring. That is, people who aren't interested in seeing a constant stream of your kids are weeding you out as well.

In the last few years, I've been aggressive in unfollowing people who post nothing but pictures and updates about their kids. It's not something I'm interested in seeing, and honestly I just can't identify with people who have kids. Seeing people who used to be close friends do nothing but post about their kids just reminds me that we no longer move in the same world.

The only exception is my cousin. I'm fine with seeing pictures of her kids, because they're family (in fact, I configured Facebook to send me a notification whenever she posts), but I'm not interested in seeing anyone else's kids.

I'm sure people are weeding me out too. I'm perfectly fine with that. Some of the people I unfriend are people who don't interact with my photos much, so I figured they've already filtered me out, or don't care to see such photos. I'd rather be unconnected to them than to clutter their news feed with posts that don't interest them.