> "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others.
G+ had this too, and I also got threats of being unfollowed if I didn't stop liking things. (I could turn it off in my settings, though, but I liked to use reshares to add comments and +1 to reshare without comment.)
Ultimately what the social networks never delivered on were the true concept of areas of interest. You should be able to follow someone's interest in a certain subject, and then like things in that context. That way if someone is following you for your programming content, they don't have to read the anime reviews that you like, or whatever.
It never happened. I think social media is a dead thing now. You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. That's about it.
- It was an overloading of the +1 button. Now a "like" was also a "here's my plus-one, repost me, maybe?".
- The behaviour wasn't obvious to the upvoting (and re-posting) user.
- People will and do upvote stuff they'd never re-post.
- It was seriously annoying.
I would suggest people disable the feature, if I noted it, or I'd unfollow them. There was no way to restrict such reposts from my own stream, other than (as I eventually discovered) avoiding the home stream entirely and viewing entirely by Circles. I had a set of higher and lower-priority Circles I'd follow, which actually helped cull most of the crud.
I strongly suspect the design decision was based on the fact that very few people actually post or repost material. They read on a consume-only mode, if at all. Google Plus's active user base was a small fraction of 1% of all profiles, and even within that set there was a phenomenal range of activity. The effect being that most of the platform was dead air.
My read is that while the extent of this may have been more so at G+ than with other leading social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), the general principles aren't. Power laws and Zipf functions are extraordinarily prevasive, and show up virtually everywhere. The problem is that there's a very narrow band of presence between "shut the heck up already" and "I thought you were dead". In the real world, distance and/or proximity mediate this. Online, where everyone is (very nearly) as digitally close to everyone, we need other means of damping the overexuberant and enticing the timid.
The "areas of interest" concept finally, sort of, got fleshed out at G+ by way of Collections, though even that was pretty butchered. Topic/channel discussions (as with Reddit / Usenet) still seem hard to beat.
FB Groups, subreddits, discords all fulfilling this purpose. The thing with these products is you seem to either get “social graph” focused or “interest” focused.
G+ had this too, and I also got threats of being unfollowed if I didn't stop liking things. (I could turn it off in my settings, though, but I liked to use reshares to add comments and +1 to reshare without comment.)
Ultimately what the social networks never delivered on were the true concept of areas of interest. You should be able to follow someone's interest in a certain subject, and then like things in that context. That way if someone is following you for your programming content, they don't have to read the anime reviews that you like, or whatever.
It never happened. I think social media is a dead thing now. You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. That's about it.