It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to leverage some of the existing social networking going on on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and making the actual posts/comments into first class global content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your content to its intended audience.

(See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)

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alex1138 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels like one of these things where mediocre people get control over something which was initially made by people who actually know what they're doing

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esseph 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Reddit is fucking miserable

Reddit is the town bar, the popular one.

Some people love the town bar! :)

Some people hate the town bar! :(

	▲	somenameforme 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level. When you start to get the number of users sites like Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have that on Reddit. I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'
	▲	alex1138 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No. I'm very specifically saying (contrary to your implication) that it's the management of the bar which is the problem HN loves to do this. "Platforms are mirrors held up to society". No, not always. Sometimes there really is unnecessary executive top-down control