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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

I think they lost a lot of us as soon as the G+ train started rolling.

The problems Google has have nothing to do with Facebook being better, or G+ being empty or whatever. Facebook is terrible.

And G+ is worse because the thing with Facebook...I'm never FORCED to reveal my Facebook identity on the open web. G+ doesn't really give me that option.

You've clearly never been to one of the many sites that insists you log in through Facebook.

But that's fine. I don't care if there's a multitude of services that I never use anyway, and they require facebook login.

I care when services that I do use, purely by virtue of being bought/owned by google, are claimed by a social site I don't use.

The only one I recall it being mandatory on is Quora. Most offer Facebook as an alternative.

And as a result, I never used Quora.

Spotify was doing it when I tried to join. They apparently changed it later, to not require Facebook. But, you know, first impressions being what they are, I'll never be a subscriber. Trust is hard to recover once lost. Guess Google is going to find that out the hard way.

Oh, it works without FB again? I joined when it was new but never used it much (niche musical taste). When I tried to login again a few (4-12) months ago, it wanted to force me to use FB so I just started ignoring them altogether.

You can join Quora with email only, Gmail auth, or Twitter.

Facebook has a similar real name policy to G+ and Facebook also considers names to be public info.

https://www.facebook.com/help/224995697512520 https://www.facebook.com/help/292517374180078

The question is, do we matter anymore?

Of course we matter. After all, Google profits from trafficking our private lives. It's a company that manufactures sugar coated surveillance devices that seem so useful that we submit to them willingly. If we didn't matter, Google will have had nothing. After all, its power stems from our voluntary submission to its merciless watching eye.

In fact, the question is frightening. Are we, prisoners, afraid that our benevolent jailers no longer pay us enough attention? That they've lost their touch to slyly subdue us by painting the convincing illusion that they have our best interests in mind? Have the abusive guardians' charms lost their potency on their admiring wards?

Methinks they already gave us the answer to that question.

Speaking of the Google analogy, I hope they do more with their acquisitions of Speaker Deck and gaug.es, as I can't recall a single feature being added or improved since their acquisitions.

I believe gaug.es has been sold, or moved home. It's now being run by FastestForward.com

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