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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

No, it wouldn't. It would turn into Facebook, which right now is a stream of unreleated, unuseful junk. Why do I care if my friends on the other side of the state check into a bar? I don't. It's pointless, useless information.

It's pointless and useless to you; you can hardly claim that it's pointless and useless to everyone. And this is exactly why I'll reiterate what I've said over and over again before... the solution is to give people better filters. You can't control what other people publish and trying to do so is pointless... but giving people filters to decide what to include/exclude in their streams it totally reasonable, and it's what Facebook, G+, and all the other "social" sites need to get better at.

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Filters are not the panacea for this problem. I could filter by application, but that does not mean all input from an application are meaningless.

The automated stuff is what everyone wants to filter, but there are apps where that could be a mix e.g. I want to explicitly share a song from Spotify vs. having them automatically do it.

The only way this would work is to have a dedicated section for posts from APIs, but that really defeats the purpose for using the API in the first place.

Yeah, let's make things more complicated yaay! Filters, and more filters - now I have to remember exactly which one does what.

Stop thinking like an engineer and think like a non-technical common user.

Because all the non-technical common users have flooded into g+ and its uncluttered stream.

Don't quite follow the logic in your argument here. Correlation != Causation failure?

Stop thinking like an engineer and think like a non-technical common user.

Being a non-technical common user doesn't mean you don't need better filters; it means the service needs to make it easier for you to explain to it what you do and don't want to see. You don't even have to expose the word "filter" to the non-technical people, but the filters need to be there conceptually, nonetheless.

Note that I'm not saying this is easy... I'm saying this is the challenge that G+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. need to take on and solve. As opposed to the challenge of "how do we not let people post stuff." That's easy, and it's a cop-out.

You can try to make it easier (probably a UX challenge) but most people don't take the time to be meticulous with setting up their filters. e.g. Gmail filters, Twitter lists, etc.

In the case of Twitter, people actually might if the interface was better. People did, before the interface changed.

Now, adding a large group of people to a Twitter list via web Twitter is such a painful exercise, I often turn to an API solution (tweetbe.at in particular) to do it.

I think the real challenge for Google would be to make it easy for the user. I have no doubt they could build some awesome filtering logic in the back. But I'm not sure they could put a super easy, non-engineer style front on it. But I agree they should try. And who knows? maybe they are working on that and want to get it rock solid before they open the flood gate. Build the filters before everyone screams "we need filters"

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