Deeply Satisfying Music: A Music Hub & Sequoia’s Reach (LinkedIn) Group

Deeply Satisfying Music

2 Members

Exploring and enjoying featured Individual music tracks, full albums, and complete Radio/Internet LIVE programs, VIDEOS or RECORDED podcasts of inspirational and significant music that starts from my foundational roots and trunk of Classical Music (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionism, Early 20th Century) and then branching into New Age, Jazz, and World Music Genres that include “polar regions of contemporary music” (and any other genres or categories of music that I may have missed).

The background (of the Photo Above) depicts root-like designs all over — thick and thin, wispy yet strong. In the center, is a boy reaching up to another person’s hand. This connection represents the idea and concept behind Sequoia’s Reach.

Sequoia’s Reach was created and developed by the John Richard Dougherty (1946-2016) who would have enjoyed seeing this collaboration and adaptation of his tour-de-force works.

The Background Cover Art was designed and hand drawn by Hilary Holmes.
Digital Creation was assisted by Lowell Aaron Court.

About Sequoia’s Reach

Mighty Sequoia Trees tower hundreds of feet in the air and can withstand intense environmental pressures like lightning, fierce winds, and forest fires. One of the strengths of this giant tree is what goes on with the roots below the surface. Unlike many trees, the roots reach out and interlock with the roots of the other Sequoias around them. As a result, each becomes empowered and reinforced by the strength of the others. Much like the Sequoia Trees, it is our hope that we all reach out and love, support, empower, and help each other in our life’s journey. Referring to all of you as individuals, may the world be a better place because you lived in it.

Also inspired by the CJSW Radio Katharsis/Processed Program —

This is a place for synergistic communications — pioneering the collection of multimedia and written words to further express and enhance the musicality that exists within each of us.

Rules:

Just use common sense — please communicate with politeness and respect.
Pretty much anything related to the great music that I mentioned in the group description is welcome here.

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14128258

Please select or click on the link above to bring up your invitation (to join LinkedIn if you haven’t already done so) and specifically to apply to join this group.

/LAC

Deeply Satisfying Music: A Music Hub & Sequoia’s Reach (MeWe) Group

Deeply Satisfying Music

9 Members

The background (of the Group Banner Picture Behind) depicts root-like designs all over — thick and thin, wispy yet strong. In the center, is a boy reaching up to another person’s hand. This connection represents the idea and concept behind Sequoia’s Reach.

Sequoia’s Reach was created and developed by the John Richard Dougherty (1946-2016) who would have enjoyed seeing this collaboration and adaptation of his tour-de-force works.

The Background Cover Art was designed and hand drawn by Hilary Holmes.
Digital Creation was assisted by Lowell Aaron Court.

About Sequoia’s Reach

Also inspired by the CJSW Radio Katharsis/Processed Program —

This is a place for synergistic communications — pioneering the collection of multimedia and written words to further express and enhance the musicality that exists within each of us.

Rules (Profile Qualifying Questions)

Just use common sense — please communicate with politeness and respect.
Pretty much anything related to the great music that I mentioned in the group description is welcome here.

https://mewe.com/join/dsmusic

Please select or click on the link above to bring up your invitation (to join MeWe if you haven’t already done so) and specifically to apply to join this group.

/LAC

Interested about transition from Google+

I’m interested to learn how you are managing your Google+ posts, and transition to other networks, if any.

I, myself, have decided to favour public posts instead of developing my collections, and duplicating some of these in other social media or private archives.

So, please, share some of your plans and activities here, if you would like…

P.S. Curiously, because of Google+ ending, it has created an unexpected opportunity for me to select other networks, and determine how and why I use this the way that I do.

—- Comments

Diana Studer+1

I lean towards letting my G+ posts fade away – but then what I want to keep, active, are the blog posts which I have written for years. In a way I would enjoy the shiny new bling it on fresh start which I had on G+.
Shelenn Ayres+1

Using Friendica’s G+ Mirroring for public posts. Will likely save a takeout in JSON.
Lowell Aaron Court

+Shelenn Ayres I’m not familiar with Friendica — thanks for sharing this, perhaps I may join after checking it out.

Farewell Google+ Comments

I remember when +Eli Fennell replied to my message about leaving Google+ in the Summer of 2015. He kindly helped me to understand that it’s okay to have various reasons, and that ultimately, it was up to me, whether to continue or not. I also appreciated his perspective on giving this type of advice to others.

When I rejoined Google+ again, in the Winter of 2017, I was pleased to see some changes, particularly the introduction of Collections. I noticed that the Pages feature was removed (or at least not easily accessible from a personal account because I had multiple Pages).

Now, that the end is finally approaching all of us on this social network, it’s time to reflect and appreciate what we have learned, and go forward in hope with whatever we do.

Perhaps, the next evolution of a social network might be to better integrate e-mail messaging and instant messaging, regardless of whether or not accounts or systems are active or deleted. This way, there would be other ways to retain and keep information, and keep in communications.

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

The following quote in italics is archived from a post by Eli Fennell, and until Google+ shutdowns sometime in August of 2019, you can also reference this article at https://plus.google.com/+EliFennell/posts/HiAQhQfdFvW

Farewell Google+

Well, this is awkward. Just a few days ago I was retiring this Collection, and here I am Posting in it again. At the time, I didn’t know that if I retired this Collection, its exact lifespan would be 10-months from the time I stopped Posting.

In case you haven’t heard… but, who am I kidding, of course you’ve heard… Google+ will be shutting down in 10-months time. After that, all my Collections on here will be forcibly retired, if not taken out behind the shack and shot.

I won’t say this isn’t even more emotionally impactful than I thought it would be. I can’t say part of me isn’t furious, but I also knew going in that a network aimed to kill Facebook would have a hard time. At one time, I thought they’d drag the social bit along forever just for the obvious benefits of the integration across services, but eventually they bifurcated the two, and I can’t say I blamed them. Once that happened, I knew it’d likely be sink or swim for us, and we’d likely tread along years past when most companies would have abandoned us.

I’m more sad than angry. It’s an End of an Era kind of thing, and the end to my favorite social network. I’ve enjoyed the evolution. I’ve bemoaned the loss of features at times, but I always went with things as best I could.

Man, have I had some amazing memories here. Only on Google+ could I have ever been a frequent guest of TV News Shows by “Hangchors” like +Sarah Hill and +Melissa Carlson (and shout out to the epic +DeAno Jackson!). Only on Google+ could I have witnessed +William Shatner sniping at +George Takei for insisting on getting his husband’s permission and a certain number of followers to add Google+ to his list of networks, or interacted in Post Comments with +Jeri Ryan (who used to love this place). Only on Google+ could I see Hulk Hogan (no longer active here) get help with his profile (which got wrongly flagged for impersonation) in a Hangout with social media experts like +Mark Traphagen (who became an incredible friend of mine, I should add). Only on Google+ could I attend a Live Concert by +Daria Musk, who was discovered here once so many years ago when a cancelled concert drove her to do a Live Hangout that spread on this network like wildfire.

Only on Google+ could I find common ground with +Mike Elgan and +Guy Kawasaki over our shared love of this place, beyond our pre-Google+ disagreements over Apple products. Only on Google+ did I ever get an acknowledgement from the head of a social network, first +Vic Gundotra and then +Dave Besbris. Only on Google+ could I become a niche but noted Memer, (yes, my Downfall Memes period was… something). Only on Google+ could I find an instant, intelligent audience for my longform content, which earned it a status as being essentially my Personal Blog until this sad day.

Only on Google+ could I have earned a reputation for Online Marketing Savvy, which netted me a few jobs and a fair income for a time, though I had already moved beyond that. And only on Google+ could I have gained tens, and even hundreds of thousands of Followers, even if admittedly the overwhelming majority of these were never really my Followers but just people who clicked a Follow button during Sign Up and never came back. And only on Google+ would my audiences and connections be so international, as to span East, West, North, and South of the Globe, with Google Translate to help us engage across borders.

Only on Google+ could I have made so many meaningful connections with people I have never met in person, so many I won’t even begin to try to name them all. Only on Google+, did I find countless Topical Collections of such richness and depth that they transcended the usual social media boundaries.

Though we have 10-months yet, I know many of you will not wait that long, and so I thought to write this Missive now. There will be more to come, I assure you.

And lest I leave all things pie eyed and glorious, I should add that it was not all joy and friendship. Some friendships ended, some very badly. Many interactions were not always pleasant. Feelings were hurt. Profiles were Blocked. People formed into private cliques, speaking cruelly of one another where only like voices could hear. There was trolling. There was flaming. There was Spam… oh, ye gods the Spam! There were times and days, when there was so much ugliness, especially during the heat of politics seasons, that I felt like walking away, and a few times I stepped back a bit.

Still in all, I could not regret this period in the least. I learned so much about so many of you, and so much more about myself, and although I am not now and never will be Sanctified, I nonetheless feel that I have grown over this time in so many ways, I barely recognize myself for who I was anymore.

I cannot conceive of how often and intensely I will feel the absence of this place in my day when it is gone, especially because I have rarely been drawn personally to the Big Social Networks. This occupied an interesting Goldilocks Zone: a network by a Big Tech company, but with more of a startup feel, especially in those early Glory Days when everything was new and fresh and everyone was just getting to know everyone else and no one was defending turf or had developed a hatred born of familiarity for each other yet.

I will likely miss this place for the rest of my life, though I may think of it less as the years go by. It’s strange, isn’t it? How a place, even a virtual place, can become something that just fits as part of your life so much, you never really knew how much you would long for it when it was gone?

Farewell, Google+! I will be here until the doors close and they turn the lights off, but for those of you who aren’t, I say: We were Merry Met, now may we Merry Part, mayhap to Merry Meet again some day on Greener Pastures.

Adieu!

—–

And the Google+ comments here to my post…

+S B — An excellent idea for a developer to create a ‘mass export script’. Maybe, this could also work with +Eli Fennell’s other current network, http://eter9.com, and we could congregate there as well.

Ah, the possibilities are endless, (and we’re at the grassroots level of determining where we might be going). I’m in favour of the #IndieWeb movement, to give power back into the hands of users, rather than merely just supporting Large Internet Service Companies or ‘Social Silos’* , (for example, the popular and well-known ones: Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and even Google’s Search Engine, Web 1.0).

* – I recommend reading Brad Enslen’s blog https://ramblinggit.com/2018/08/when-the-social-silos-fall/
to more intelligently discuss what can be done.
Diana Studer+1

Goldilocks zone – apt name for my experience here too.
I’ll remember once getting a comment from Yonatan Zunger.
Julian Dumitrascu

I can give a helpful reply.
If our conversation will be long, Medium can help us organize it better. Under what terms would agree to use your Medium account (https://medium.com/sol-id/data-management-basics-dc85367f10a2) to participate e.g. in the conversation to which I link?
(Note: One could use unlisted Medium stories instead of e-mail messages.)

data management basics – sol id – Medium

medium.com
Lowell Aaron Court

+Julian Dumitrascu I started reading your Medium article, and it is very interesting. I don’t know if I have a subscription to Medium (probably just a free account for now).

Let’s start a dialogue somewhere appropriate. I’ll probably look into Medium soon.

Julian Dumitrascu

+Lowell Aaron Court You are not paying to use Medium.
I’ll take time to agree with you on what is appropriate when you can get back to this conversation.
Lowell Aaron Court+1

+Julian Dumitrascu Okay, thanks for clarifying that. I’ll get back to you, perhaps in the next while (2-5 days).
Lowell Aaron Court

+Julian Dumitrascu — I’ve started reading your Medium article again. I noticed that you have an invitation to contact your company for additional help. At this point in time, I don’t require any professional help, but thanks for the article, and for commenting here.

Lord of the Rings Book vs. the Movie

The books leave more room for imagination, but the movies leave you with images to replace your imagination and shortened (or mass-produced) entertainment. Once seen, a movie has the power to remove your memory of your imagination.

https://plus.google.com/+EpiclordoftheringsBlogspotpage/posts/BCai4vRtQVP

Comments —-

Samanvitha R+1

I personally prefer books. No matter how great the movies are, books are always special! They take us to a different world which can never be done by any of the movies!! Not that I hate the movies. I do like them but I prefer books to movies!! 😊
Ânuja Jadhav

The books for sure. JRRT’s masterpiece, pure magic
Beyza Buyurgan

The movie was beautiful, but I think the book was more beautiful and exciting!! 🙂
Jacob Nevill

Man…I do like both. I guess Movies has a slight edge for me because Howard Shores music really brought the world to life..
That said, I really do love the books…
The Nemo Project

I’ve only seen one movie, but I like both! 🙂

yuri smoglian

books are far more better
puppyinabox

I grew up reading the hobbit with my parents and now I’m reading the trilogy.
平均の丸薬••мєαииριllѕ

Moovie
Lowell Aaron Court

The books leave more room for imagination, but the movies leave you with images to replace your imagination and shortened (or mass-produced) entertainment. Once seen, a movie has the power to remove your memory of your imagination.
Hannah Soca

I loved the book,and I read it before I ether the movie,but the movie was just more intriguing to me
The Media Table+1

I have to go with the films simply because not only was the book brought to life but with the films you have an actual face to put the character names to.Seeing the actual location of middle earth gave a sense of believability to the book.

Chernobyl Meltdown Anniversary

My old chemistry teacher used to make jokes about this, but it was really a bad joke turned into really awful and disastrous proportions. Of course, living in the western hemisphere, we were somewhat separated from the disaster, but it did effect what we thought about the effects of this, even if most of it we read in newspapers, or listened to radio or watched on TV. If I recall, the weather was affected and attitudes about nuclear power were heightened.

https://plus.google.com/104153292881404182920/posts/XQZFR4JSDki

#chernobyl

Original Post Text

Old School 4 Life™

80s History, Technology and Social Changes

Apr 26, 2017

On this day:
At 26th April of 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date occurred at Chernobyl, in Kiev. It is one of only two classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles. During the accident itself, 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers are still being investigated.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident occurred on April 26, 1986. It was the largest nuclear energy disaster in history. The explosion took place in the fourth block of the Chernobyl power plant, located only 120 km from the capital of Ukraine, Kiev, close to the border with Belarus.

Chernobyl power plant was at that time one of the largest in the world. It was dedicated to a strategic military program for the Soviet army. The actual crash happened due to a coincidence of several factors. Beside the fact that the reactor did not have an updated security system, it had a low level of automation. On the fatal night of April 26, there was an experiment going on, which should have tested the inertial range of the turbo-generator unit. Overheating fuel caused the destruction of the generator’s surface.

At 1:24 AM local time, 40-60 seconds after commencing the experiment, two large explosions took place. According to some accident investigators, taking off all the absorbing sticks from the active zone of the reactor, together with the reactor’s growing power capacity, the crash was unavoidable. It was recorded that safety systems were shut off or even out of service at the time of the initial explosion and the explosion of steam and hydrogen blew the 1200 ton cover of the reactor and destroyed the roof.

After a few seconds there came the second explosion. According to several independent studies, while the first explosion was normal, chemical, the second explosion with the burning of the prompt neutrons, it had characteristics of a nuclear explosion with a yield of 0.3 kilotons (equal to around 300 tons of TNT). According to witnesses the first explosion was followed by a red blaze and the second explosion had a light-blue blaze, after which a mushroom cloud rose above the reactor.

The nuclear disaster was also a coincidence and the reactor should have been shut down before the experiment could begin. However, this was postponed by nine hours because of the forthcoming May 1 celebrations and the electricity needed to fulfill the production plan. This delay meant that the experiment had to be managed by a different shift than the one which prepared it. The night shift conducting the experiment comprised fewer experienced operators.

Radioactivity started to radiate out of the destroyed and burning fourth reactor of Chernobyl power plant, which contaminated both the near and far environment. The investigation of Chernobyl disaster was officially closed with a result that the personnel of the power plant did not follow the necessary safety regulations.

Lenin Nuclear Power Plant was just the beginning of an aftermath that re-wrote not just the safety rules in nuclear energy, but also the history of mankind. Radioactivity started to radiate out of the destroyed and burning fourth reactor of Chernobyl power plant, which contaminated both the near and far environment.

The first step in liquidation of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl was extinguishing the burning reactor hall and the roof of turbo-generator’s hall. Special power plant fire department, together with firemen from the nearby town of Chernobyl, extinguished the fire within three hours after the explosion. Yet, in the heart of the reactor, graphite was still burning…

Firemen who worked at the accident did not know the cause of the fire and thus they just poured water at the ruins of the reactor. This worsened the situation and several smaller explosions followed, together with a severe radioactive contamination. To prevent radioactivity from further spreading into the environment, the reactor was filled with five thousand tons of boron, dolomite, sand, clay and lead compound, thrown from a helicopter flying above the reactor. These loose materials extinguished the burning graphite and absorbed radioactive aerosols.

The explosion at Chernobyl brought up radioactive substances to the altitude of 1.5 kilometer in the air. In this elevation, wind from the southeast took the radioactive cloud to as far as Scandinavia. The cloud flew over Scandinavia and then turned back to Ukraine again. During the day of the accident, the direction of the wind changed to westward.

The second contaminated cloud thus flew via Poland to Czechoslovakia and further to Austria. There, it bounced back from the Alps and flew back to Poland. As far as we know today, there is no place in the world where the radioactive clouds from Chernobyl were not present. Contaminated clouds flew all around the world.

The most affected territories were Ukraine and Belarus, which decided to evacuate parts of their countries forever because of the contamination of the environment. In the process of contamination, a large role was played by radioactive iodide. This element has a short disintegration half-time and relatively soon after the accident naturally decomposed to harmless substances.

Today, the radioactive pollution is made up mostly by substances such as strontium and cesium: these have a 30-year disintegration half-time. Thus, they will continue to pollute the close environment for several decades. Isotope of plutonium and americium will be present at the respective territory probably for several thousand years. However, they have a negligible radiation affect for the human body.

There are still radioactive places in the Chernobyl zone, although the levels are now a fraction of the radiation levels from 1986. Much of the radioactive isotopes have gone deeper into the soil. Every year they decrease by around one centimeter. Radiation and its intensity at Chernobyl is not harmful or dangerous for human health today.

#Chernobyl #ChernobylDisaster
#Onthisday #Ukraine #NuclearAccident
#NuclearDisaster #Inmemoryof
#Kiev #80sMemories #Disaster
#History #CatastrophicFailure
#ChernobylNuclearPowerPlant

Comments —-

I remember this when i was a kid.. was not allowed to play in grass for a while and eat domestic vegetables.
Hüseyin Bıçakcı

I was 6 years old, drink milk and eat yogurt was inconvenient.

Show original text
Lowell Aaron Court+1

My old chemistry teacher used to make jokes about this, but it was really a bad joke turned into really awful and disastrous proportions. Of course, living in the western hemisphere, we were somewhat separated from the disaster, but it did effect what we thought about the effects of this, even if most of it we read in newspapers, or listened to radio or watched on TV. If I recall, the weather was affected and attitudes about nuclear power were heightened.
David Reiss+1

So that’s what it looks like. Meltdown
coffee 7+1

+Lowell Aaron Court ya well it wasnt funny at all ,if u dig deeper ,u`ll learn the if there wasnt for amazing men that gave their lifes ,there would have been another explosion ,a much bigger one that would make half of Europe inhabitable

The Darth Fader

Nice and well said, especially with May the 4th (or Star Wars Day) rolling (er, sliding) along too!

https://plus.google.com/+alesis/posts/CkSBu9Bk3ct

Comments —–

Lowell Aaron Court

For the audiophile and Star Wars fan —

Ben Smith

lol
Kelly Kay

Hehe
Lowell Aaron Court

Nice and well said, especially with May the 4th (or Star Wars Day) rolling (er, sliding) along too!
Lowell Aaron Court

Thanks again for creating this hilarious meme — I’ve shared it today in anticipation of Star Wars day through Twitter and e-mail
…Signed — Yours truly — a Star Wars fan and above all, an Audiophile

My dampened enthusiasm with Google+

Why just comment and share in facebook, when you can Google+ it, and create more fun by getting outside of your friends and family racket, and connect with people who share your PASSION and interests?! Why not unless you are afraid? Join me here, and let’s kick the boundaries out of meaningless scroll and click activities.

And then, I found this article — which dampened my enthusiasm a bit.

https://plus.google.com/+GideonRosenblatt/posts/Wrig2znc3r2

Original Post text

Gideon Rosenblatt

Analysis and News About Google

Apr 18, 2017

Losing My Patience with Google+

Over the last six months or so I have watched as the quality of engagement here on Google+ has steadily declined. I have watched my follower count fluctuate and flatline. I have watched as people I used to engage with quite a bit here have left or dramatically scaled back their investments of time here. And yes, I have seen my own enthusiasm for investing time here wane significantly.

I ask myself why and the answers are never as simple as I would like. In the end though, I have come to the sad conclusion that the real thing that is killing Google+ is just plain bad management.

Lack of Attention
One gets the real sense that many of the people now charged with running Google+ don’t really understand what it was that once made this service so good in its early days. Indeed, one gets the sense that few of the people managing the service today even really use Google+. There are a few noteworthy exceptions like +Yonatan Zunger and +Leo Deegan, of course. I once made a circle with some 50+ Googlers who were once active here, and when I click on that stream, well, it feels a lot like a ghost town.

+Bradley Horowitz, the VP in charge of Streams, Photos and Sharing, (which is where Google+ sits within the Google org structure) hasn’t posted here on Google+ in half a year.

Oh, and remember +Luke Wroblewski, who used to manage Google+ and would send out all those updates on the redesign? Well, he hasn’t posted a single thing here in over 7 weeks (even though @lukew is quite active on Twitter). You know why? I just happened to check his LinkedIn profile, and he’s apparently no longer managing Google+. I don’t recall seeing any announcement of this change – just a sudden silence from the man perhaps most responsible for the UI makeover of Google+.

Rudderless and Un-resourced
That decision to remake the Google+ UI followed a long string of decisions going back to the separation of Photos and Hangouts, each of which have seriously hurt the service. I know there were probably some good reasons to move to the new, mobile-dominant (as opposed to “mobile-friendly”) UI, but the lack of enduser empathy from deprecating all the old functionality really was pretty staggering. Much of it hasn’t come back, and much of what has is so stripped down (e.g. Events, community moderation) that it isn’t really that usable.

As users, we have been asked to be patient and to have faith in the new strategy. Because I have been such a huge fan of Google+ for so long, that is exactly what I have done. I’ve been patient. I’ve believed. Believed that some big, cool fix was coming down the pike that would not only fix all the problems caused by the UI decision, but actually start innovating again with some cool new functionality.

Yes, we got Collections, and they actually are quite useful even if they do need a lot of work still. But that’s really about it. It’s been a couple years now and the silence is stultifying.

And finally, it hit me:

Maybe this is it. Maybe Google has significantly curtailed its investments in this network. Maybe the management squandered the scarce resources it did have on a redesign that users weren’t really even asking for. And maybe, just maybe, what we see right now is pretty much what we’re going to get.

User Investments
And this is where I start to get really mad. Like many others here, I have invested a lot of personal time and energy building a following here. Like many of you, I have poured heart and soul into filling this place not just with great content, but also with a sense of community. I could have made those investments in Twitter or Facebook or reddit, but like many of you, I made them here. And now I’m starting to wonder how smart of a decision that was.

All of this is particularly raw right now because I’m starting to play around a bit with the new distributed social network called Mastodon (https://mastodon.technology/@gideonro). It’s far from perfect, but one thing that is very different is that it is open source and federated, rather than centrally owned and controlled.

There are lots of implications to this different model. For one, there is lots of competition and innovation in the works because Mastodon sits on top of GNU Social and rests within a “Fediverse” of related, and interoperable, social network platforms. They are working on solutions that make it easy to export your content from one platform to another – to prevent lock-in. Also, there is a lot of visibility on exactly what investments are being made in the platform by various contributors.

More importantly though, there is a very conscious understanding that the value of these networks is only partially the result of the software developers behind these solutions. Just as much of it lies with the end users.

In the end, this is the thing that I am most frustrated about right now with Google+. End users have made this place every bit as much as the coders and product planners behind Google+. This isn’t to in any way diminish the importance of those contributions. But what I do find frustrating is the way that Google seems to regularly dismiss the importance, and the real economic and social value, of end user contributions. This was true with Google Reader, and sadly it appears to be true with Google+.

I’m still rooting for Google+ to turn things around, of course. I have a huge soft spot for this place, given all the great learning I’ve done here with my fellow travelers. But one thing is clear: I’m losing my patience, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Comments —-

There were about 436 comments — picking some of the best ones.

Chad Haney+36

+Gideon Rosenblatt, I’ve been talking about this with other early adoptors. Like you, I invested a lot of time in G+. The interaction in the early days was tremendous and well worth the effort. Now, not so much. A lot of my fellow science writers are gone.
John Lewis+82

I remember thinking of the innovations, and how Google was a step ahead of Facebook. They have up the advantages and then lagged. It feels like a legacy no one is inspired by.

I want the promise land. I want a circle full of forums. I want to seamlessly share documents, images, and video. Google has the power to make this a special place, it’s not a competition with Facebook. It never should have been measured that way. That makes it feel like a failure. If this political cycle showed anything, it was this is still a viable place.

So Google. Own this. Make it your own.
Hashim Warren+4

What a waste of my time. Why don’t they just sunset the service and move on?
Gideon Rosenblatt+40

I totally agree, +John Lewis. In fact, I wish I’d added something to that effect in the post itself. There was just so much potential here and this was not about beating FB on the social graph. It was about creating a shared interest graph:
plus.google.com – Yes, Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook, but not in the directly competit…

Still lots of potential, but I fear that the window was squandered and that the company may just have lost its appetite for more investment.
Dran Fren+16

I agree, it’s amazing how the quality of the stream differs over time (independently of user input factor) and it is very difficult to spot the logic that is supposedly behind it. The best indicator (at least for me) that something is being seriously messed up, are the “recommended for you” posts: There I got consistently over long periods low quality crap, often conspiracy theories, outright rightwing posts and things like that…
Grizwald Grim+6

They intentionally kill things after dumbing them down to uselessness. Us and Google is probably technically an abusive relationship at this point… But they’re Google… and we like to be on the winning team…
WSG Gallery+17
+Gideon Rosenblatt like others my feed is becoming much quieter. G+ never worked like FB for which I was glad. I joined to read science writers and others and also develop an audience on G+ for my sculpture. Unfortunately the science writers are leaving and the audience for my sculpture never materialized on G+.

So far G+ has worked out to be as large a waste of time as FB. Is G+ going to have a new & improved version coming out soon – could care less. Same with FB.

FB will still be around in some way or another in 5 years. G+ probably will not. FB’s main business is keeping FB going. G+ is just an appendage of ABC. It will wither and die.

Gina Fiedel+69

The saddest thing may actually be that you aren’t alone +Gideon Rosenblatt. That’s the thing that ultimately becomes most concerning- that there are enough of us that are frustrated and disappointed that the pull of the drift away will become wider and wider. I have come to accept the situation to some degree, with a sigh and a small shred of hope that we can hang on and somehow, magically, the flame will be relit.

The thing is that Google Plus remains one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. The depth of learning, the friendships, the discovery of writing as a form I get creative juice from, the work peers and clients. I’ve re-incorporated FB into my life and unsurprisingly, the people there that make it worth it are the people I met here from all over the world.

My husband teases me about being the last one to leave the party in many of our social situations. Well…. I’m pretty sure I’ll be the last to leave G+ if it comes to that. I’ll just keep hanging in and hanging on gosh darn it. (stubbornly

Gideon Rosenblatt+20

I think that’s the part that is most frustrating, +George Kozi. There’s a kind of indifference that comes from the way things are managed here. I don’t think it’s an intentional thing necessarily, but more a product of the kind of secrecy that Google has had to maintain from running a search service that people are always trying to game. The difference here, of course, is that this service is co-created. With us.

Rob Gordon+22

It’s been massively disappointing and just keeps getting worse and worse. I haven’t seen the slightest evidence the Google cares about this. Everyone who was a power user here wanted “interest channels” but instead we got “collections” which totally flopped.

I’m still hanging on by a thread to my big entrepreneurs community here, but Google has made it next to impossible to have an actual online community- they even removed Google Hangouts, which while never properly integrated could have been fantastic if they did it the right way.

Donna Williams+28

+Gideon Rosenblatt I came to the very same conclusions only many, many months ago, just after the appalling changes that were thrust upon users. I was the biggest evangelist for Google+, I hung in there long after others walked away smirking about how they were right about it being a waste of time and effort.

I have a presence on here for business purposes only, but I used to have lots of friends here.

I’m under no illusion that anyone (+Larry Page, +Eric Schmidt) or anyone else in Google actually cares. They developed an amazing social platform, one which inspired, encouraged and allowed growth and development and then they quite simply broke it.

This is Google … and you simply cannot put time, effort or faith into any of it’s products or services because they will be killed off, removed from service … whatever you want to call it. It’s happened time and time again and I predict Google+ and even Gmail will come to the same fate

Nora Qudus+9

I know I hate the new formats and it has become difficult for me to blend into the new . So I just pop in and out. I loved here but now it is all different no long personal just a cold format that is also twitchy and jumpy from just a user point of view. It takes several ttys to get pictures loaded so I rarely bother now….I am depressed by the changes and all good things always get “improved” to death

Firas Hermez+16

My frustration with G+ started when I noticed that there was very little impact in terms of the Network’s activity, compare that to other Networks (Twitter specifically).

Basically one could argue that the activity on Twitter actually flows into the physical world and affects it, Google+ not so much.

Another source of frustration is that virtually all the people and groups who live in the same geographical space as me and have similar interests are no where to be found on G+, they’re instead active on Twitter & FB.

So while I have made some really great connections over the years and have learned so much from the people who are active on G+ much of what I’ve learned and much of what I want to do seems to confined to G+ with no chance of it being put across those who are geographically close to me and happen to share my interests.

I believe +Gideon Rosenblatt summed it up very well with his post, I am loathe to leave G+ simply because I have made some excellent connections over here but I have realized that G+ is just a vast island with practically no way for me to get my message across to the mainland =(

And to make matters worse the people behind it appear to have resigned to just keeping the network on life-support until a time comes where they decide to pull the plug.

Stuart O’Neill+25

+Tom Rolfson and I have had the same frustrations for a long time.

G+ was/is the perfect way unite all Google products and services. I was convinced and fought the anti-G+ wars and simple silliness.

Like you I’ve been here a long, long time. This is the only place I’ve found with intelligent discussion plus wonderful art, music and photography.

The horribly named Hangout were the first of their kind and offered so many capabilities that my heart began to break when the new shiny toys began to attract the spotlight.

No one can tell me the Google couldn’t create a one touch ‘hangout’. If freaking Facebook did it with one way communication and G+ already had true 2 way communication finding. A new start button should be a snap.

I agree +Gideon Rosenblatt that perhaps bad management, or worse, lack of interest is the root of the problem.

I’ve not participated nearly as much this year as I have previously. Partly I was dispirited at the ‘hangout’ dwindling and partly for personal health reasons.

I hope +Tom Rolfson is feeling up to the cricitcal analysis he has considered writing for some time. He was in this space before most of us thought of a platform that could unite so many function and products.

G+ is still the only substantive network that, to my mind and heart, encourges new relationships worldwide. I could start a list of the people I have met, face to face, all over the world.

An example of relationships with mutual respect is +Gideon Rosenblatt , +David Kutcher, +David Amerland, songstress and composer +Daria Musk, Australian musician +Paul Platt and it goes on and on…And I would know none of them without G+.

I hope we remain the place where we can have real interactions.

Thanks for the topic, Gideon. It needs an even deeper discussion. G+ still has the capabilities. Perhaps we need to throw more deliberate work into using its many assets.

Peter Strempel+50

Hypothesis: Google Plus’s declining ‘engagement’, promoted by a series of design decisions divorced from informed and innovation-driven use cases, is a classic example of a wicked problem gone unrecognised and unaddressed.

Wicked problems were defined in the late 1960s and early 1970s by University of California Berkeley professors Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber as the kind that could not be addressed with methods and techniques derived from a dominant engineering-scientific-management paradigm (ESMP). The paradigm used almost exclusively in IT-related disciplines, and most hostile to any development, product, or service which relies on social evaluation and judgement for its success or failure.

Social media can work only if a critical mass of people finds in the platforms available a useful function or functions that doesn’t/don’t alienate their economic, social, or political sensibilities. You could call that a use case, or cases, which provide more perceived value than costs.

Google Plus ‘created’ a use case early on mostly because its user base found their own value in the, as yet, relatively unrestricted and flexible architecture of the place, often contrary to the deliberate design of progressive and inherently anti-social fragmentation of interests and compartmentalisation of confirmation bias bubbles. But ESMP interventions turned it progressively into a forced march through an anti-social conception of the social.

ESMP people are exactly the wrong specialists to drive Google Plus engagement because they will always attempt to subject human behaviours to algorithmic certainties. Alphabet would be better to put together a team with anthropologists, public affairs specialists, and social scientists to consider what kind of features ESMP types should build to encourage the commitment of time and effort that is called engagement.

The social is messy, noisy, vibrant, annoying, delightful, and … engaging. Human, not ESMP. Serendipitous, not menu driven. As unpredictable as it can be and still meet Alphabet’s data mining objectives.

Conclusion: Alphabet seems wedded to the idea that you shed experiments rather than try to build on them by re-examining first premisses to understand why something didn’t work the way it was intended (double loop learning). A corporate culture immune to double-loop learning will only ever create a series of rolling failures, even if these are profitable for a time. If Google Plus is considered at all valuable, it’s time to put a person or team in charge that doesn’t have a primarily technical perspective. ESMP specialists should serve human needs, not determine them in their blundering, Frankensteinian fashion.

Vb Wyrde+4

The management has been absolutely atrocious. They’ve been mangling useful interfaces against the loud and vocal protests of everyone I know here. Frankly I don’t think this is accidental, or merely a product of bad management. Even poor managers will get some things right. They seem intent on destroying a once vibrant community of like minded creative types who fled FB because ‘reasons’. Google has become a shining example of Anti-Costomer Service. Time to move on. I will be checking out the various open source p2p solutions. Google, sadly, is rapidly sinking. Too bad. They had a really great thing going, but then ruined it. Frankly, I smell ‘politics’.

Daniel Estrada+28

We all knew this was Google’s management style years ago. None of these complaints are new, or unique to G+. Google has never successfully managed a community of users outside of YouTube, which is run somewhat independently of all of Google’s other services. We here at G+ saw very clearly what happened when Google tried to merge the communities here with Youtube. What happened was we lost.

G+ is currently an appendix. It serves no useful function and fills no specific niche in the stack of even dedicated users. I keep using the service only to keep contact with some of the weak ties I’ve developed here. I’ve been urging those ties to migrate to other services so the network remains in tact.

From the beginning, Google approached G+ from the perspective of their tech ecosystem: how can we fit this (fb/twitter-like) service into our product offering? This purely instrumental approach is never the way to grow a community. It was doomed from the start.

If Google was smart, they should have taken their model from services like Tumblr, whose organic and self-motivated communities generate the content that continue to drive the memespace. Tumblr doesn’t see users at Instagram levels, but it sees engagement and creative content production that should be the envy of anyone tasked with developing a social network.

If the people at G+ had sat down with the community leaders trying to cultivate the service (people like +Gideon Rosenblatt and others in this thread) and asked them what they wanted from the service, and really catered the product to its natural audience, we could have had a beautiful thing.

Instead, it was squandered on playing catch up with the Silicon Valley Joneses. What a waste, what a waste.

Giselle Minoli+18

+George Station pinged me into a share of this +Gideon Rosenblatt. It is a perfect example of things that I’m missing unless I spend, literally, all day here and I’m simply not willing to spend that much time sifting through Notifications.

Maybe I do, maybe I don’t have a different perspective than laying this at the feet of the interminable IU/platform/design/feature changes…but all of that said, instead I’m going to lay this at the feet of Users. I know that’s harsh, but it is my own observation that Users themselves fell pray to the ever-changing UI ‘stuff’ instead of staying true to their own courses and instead of championing and supporting one another here.

When I first came to this Medium Klout scores were all the rage and they quickly were replaced by the importance of Follower count and umpteen posts about ‘how to’ Properly Do G+…post all the time, share all the time, comment all the time. Honestly, it felt like nursery school and children being lectured to about how to make really nice thank you notes.

And, just like in school, individuality…all of the interesting people who flocked here because it promised freedom from external packaging, freedom from being chained and bound, from being brutalized into submission…submitting to the way, the how, the why…was squashed, dismissed, disregarded and it became a competition for influence, for importance and there was a total and complete disregard for and appreciation for a diverse palette.

Woe be unto you if, like I did, you championed a way to just simply find things here by using Collections, only to discover that they were designed to completely replace a free-form expressive stream, unpredictable and wild, like wandering the streets of New York.

Woe be unto you if, like me, you dared post, a lot, about politics…head for the hills…because you would have been virtually beaten to death by trolls.

Woe be unto you if, like me, you didn’t spend all your time here and you were therefore thought not to be a player, a Power User…because you would fall of the veritable radar screen.

I have actually been told, that politics and serious issues are not welcome here.

Better to share pictures of butterflies and landscapes. Better not to make waves.

Yes, that is all dictation coming from the powers that be at G+…but it was all accepted by Users.

I share your sorrow, Gideon, at time spent doing something you believed in. But that is, quite frankly, the artist’s way. Artists write poems, novels, make films, paint, sculpt and spend years of effort doing things never knowing whether it is going to work, whether there will be an audience, whether there will ever be a ‘pay off.’

The only thing that anyone can count on is their own website, their own work.

Themselves.

Tom Rolfson+49

+Stuart O’Neill thank you for tagging me onto this threat. +Gideon Rosenblatt your assessment is right on and very well said. I’ll add from the perspective of being one of the first 1,000 people on here, investing many thousands of dollars and hours into streaming Hangouts, even being told I INSPIRED THEM TO CREATE HANGOUTS ON AIR & YOUTUBE LIVE and asked to “advise & guide them” in the development of those, and then with Vic Gundotra very private Hangouts discussing features that needed to be added to communities. (For those who don’t know, I co-founded what was the world’s first privately held global social network in 1991) not bragging but “I KNOW how to make communities and chat super successful.” Google started paying attention and then just drifted off. When I’d ask privately with engineers “Why was this decision made? Why was that decision made?” it always came back to “That’s what the numbers told us people wanted.” That might be, but were they even asking the right questions? I doubt it. I don’t think a bunch of very young engineers who’ve had little if any “customer service experience” even comprehend how to ask what people want. A real test here is to see if +Sergey Brin will respond as he’s followed me since the earliest days. Do they at the very top even care of Google+ fails or succeeds? I can tell them that it’s VERY QUICKLY failing as of late. It started about 2 years ago, but has begun an even faster decent. Like Gideon, I can look at my own posts and see less interaction (So I in turn post less and invest more time on Twitter), I can see my followers number flatline or vary by a couple hundred with almost the same # as Gideon.

I’ve said from the very start, the #1 most obvious problems have been naming “Google+” is an idiotic name. Why use a symbol in your name that can’t be recognized in a URL? I said that before the beta invite arrived the day it was launched. Then “Hangouts” the greatest misnomer of what could have been game changing technology ever. I had to assist with the design & presentation to the CEO of a VERY LARGE >$4B company and suggest that he and his executives use “Hangouts” to communicate. This guy barely has time to “Hangout” with his friends after 18 holes of golf, has executives working 50-60hr weeks as the company is growing at a phenomenal rate… When he heard the term “Hangout” I could see him physically recoil and immediately dismiss the idea. If we’d been able to say “Video Conference” it would have made a difference, but we elected not to because upon start he’d see the word “Hangout” plastered all over everywhere. Google had the most powerful tool for community and business and squandered it. I’ll say it again “GOOGLE HAD THE MOST POWERFUL TOOL FOR COMMUNITY AND BUSINESS AND SQUANDERED IT.” While 5 years ahead, the entire world knows about Facebook live and even some of the most tech savvy people I know in other industries have never heard of a “Hangout” (I’d unleash a string of expletives here to express how lame it is… but I’ve told everyone from Chee Chew to Vic Gundotra and it’s never made a difference.) Again, they knew my background, they acknowledged I built and ran the first and most successful social network from 91-94 (I sold it), they asked my guidance and the dismissed what I IMPLORED to them to fix and change.

Google+ has become a lame entity that I pretty much only use for business purposes to feed stuff into Google search. It’s still useful for that, but for personal purposes… sadly, the community that I once felt here is gone. I miss many of the dozens and dozens of close friends I made around the world.

Google engineers will sit on their bouncy balls and spend their 20% time trying to re-invent something, meanwhile they’ve not even learned how to make the engine in front of them run. Google will work on world changing technology and not realize they still have the potential right under their nose… all they need to do is learn how to package and market it. What customer service is and how to communicate with real people not a bunch of propeller heads living in a bubble called GooglePlex.

Google, you’ve fucked-up… badly. You’ve squandered the best technology and in the process broken promises (I could privately name a few), ignored feedback from your most connected members. You created a culture where people were promoted to celebrities and real celebrities weren’t appreciated. You asked people to give you their time, they did and you squandered that too.

The bottom line:

Google has diminished it’s user’s contributions to virtually nothing and at the same time found nothing to replace it with. There is no PLUS to using Google, and even I…the one who quit Facebook over 5 years ago have gone back there because the investment of my time and money on Google+ and WITH Google engineers has become an insult and caused me a feeling of disdain for the company in the process.

Google forgot how they were made popular. Google AdWords and AdSense made millions of small webmasters their partners and put the Google search box on their websites. Without them they’d never have been known. But now, there’s little if any way for an individual to make money WITH Google. The feeling of or affinity for Google and incentive to help promote Google is gone. Google is now a big “nothingness” of dehumanization and automatrons running things purely on numbers… they still don’t understand “Social” isn’t numbers.

Grant Montgomery+3

I have given up on google+ as a viable business to business resource. The management team seems deaf to the pleas of those striving to make this a viable product. In a perfect world, facebook or twitter will create a search engine and adapt a B2B model that will end this nonsensical madness that will never reach full potential.

Rob Gordon+11

+Giselle Minoli about the “you miss posts unless you spend your lifetime here” issue remember that’s by design – there is no “mark as read” button as there was on Google Reader that would let you make sure you have read all your friends posts even if you hadn’t been here in a while. Like you said Google wanted “the stream” so we were supposed to post here all the time.

The problem with trolling is another design issue. The human brain reacts to negative input far more than it does to positive. That is just the we are wired. On Twitter, when people post negative crap it ends up on their own profile. On Google+ they can post crap all day without repercussions.

Chris Sutton+30

+Gideon Rosenblatt Thanks for the post, there are a lot of people, me included, who are increasingly frustrated at the decline of real interaction on the platform. Google will of course point to the success of collections, and if that were measured purely in numbers, then it has been. I seem to have gathered 300+K followers since collections launched, but sadly no more than a handful of those followers have become friends. As a photographer I’m happy that more people get to see my work, but it doesn’t lead to much real interaction of any sort. (The glaring exception is the G+ Mentorship program that has survived the UI changes and provides wonderful support for photographers and vibrant communities, although even there the UI changes have made it increasingly difficult for all involved). From a logical perspective, it seems odd that a UI change would create such a decline in engagement, humans will overcome all manner of obstacles to make something work, but the technical difficulties seem to be the tipping point, the final straw that just makes it all too hard. I’ve loved being a part of G+, and for a long time it seemed to be a platform with glorious potential. I’d love to see some of that potential realised.

David Kutcher+20

I think it’s pretty simple, really; the interaction that we received in the early days of g+ were an anomaly. We all knew this, we often remarked “I don’t receive nearly this much incredible interaction on Facebook or Twitter!” And now we don’t. G+ has moved to collections, forget your profile follows. They’re dead. And if you post to a collection you’ll get lots of new collection followers, most of which are passive. And your interactions are drive-by like Twitter. Forget about converting any of the collection people to your profile, it’ll never happen.

But regarding the rest. .. as I said about Dunbar, I think many of us are just burned out. I spend more time lurking then posting. Or I’ve changed the nature of what I post. Or the Interaction ROI simply isn’t there anymore.

But that’s what happens. .. everything good must come to an end someday.

123 DIGI • WIN Service+2

+Gideon Rosenblatt we embrace G Suite as a Collaboration plattform with G+ as an app. Collections, Communities, Posts, Streams, they are just spokes on a wheel. The hub is where our content is co-edited, discussed and used to create assets in real live. Google owns G+ not users. If we want’t to “own” somthing, it must be stored in a different “container”. Would you be interested in the details?

Giselle Minoli+10

+Rob Gordon I understand, but don’t share, your view that people are wired to respond to negative input. That is true of some people, not of others. What changed between the early days and now is that, like a new neighborhood discovered by people charting out new territory in a city…the unafraid flocked to the new, the untried, the untested and showed up fully present. Then gentrification happens and everyone flocks to the cool eateries and coffee shops. Then those who had nothing to do with planting the garden discover the nice space and throw their soda cans and cigarette butts all over it.

There is a difference between what the ‘owners’ of this medium do…and what the Users themselves do. When something is free…it is easy not to tend to it…and to shrug…oh…there’s another soda can another cigarette butt. And you hear people say, Ignore them there’s nothing you can do.

Yes. There is. But it didn’t happen here because the expectation was that the ‘owner’ would tend to it. You would not drive around in a car covered with bird poop…at least I don’t think you would.

I know I am not the only one who wonders what social media means in this context. Perhaps it…and we…go through phases of acceptance depending on where we are in our own lives at any given moment.