I’ve been using the new G+ interface for long enough now to realize something: Emphasizing Communities and…

I’ve been using the new G+ interface for long enough now to realize something: Emphasizing Communities and Collections is implicitly deemphasizing people.

I think I understand the motivation for this change.  When someone stops popping up in my stream it’s never entirely clear if they’ve left or they’re being pushed down in the stream, but I definitely notice it.  If I’m following collectives instead of individuals, someone dropping off is much less visible.  I’m not saying that this is an attempt to hide people leaving the platform or anything like that, just that I can see the value over the long term in focusing on groups instead of individuals.

That said, for someone like me who’s been active almost from the beginning, this shift is incredibly jarring.  Almost all of the angst I experience and that I hear from other users revolves around the fact that for us G+ is fundamentally about collecting and interacting with interesting individuals.  Put another way, I care about pretty much everything Yonatan Zunger has to say because so far almost everything he’s said has been interesting.  There’s no such thing as a public community that has that character.

I think this focus on communities has a lot of potential, and I’m deeply sympathetic to any effort that looks so much like Usenet.  I’m still on board, but having the whole premise of the platform shift has been, and will be, difficult to get used to.