pondering the futility of social networks

[rone]

I'm >this< close to deleting my orkut account; that is, to requesting that it be deleted. I will set aside for a moment my opinion of social networks, and point out why orkut sucks as a service:

• There's no communication. There's no news page that tells you what Orkut is working on, what new features are coming, what bugs are being fixed, not even a fucking FAQ. This is key.
• The "communities" suck ass. There's no threading; if you leave, your posts become "anonymous"; only 10 entries are shown per page, and you can't change that.
• The random disappearance of accounts and communities lead many to believe that there's an active censorship vector. In itself, that's not a big deal, but because there's no established policy, and referring back to my first complaint, we can't KNOW what's going on because nobody's SAYING ANYTHING.
• orkut's First Law: You can't delete your own account. orkut's Second Law: Your account can be deleted at any time for any slight against orkut, real or imagined. Corollary via Murphy's Law: trying to diss orkut in order to get your account deleted will fail.

I used to defend orkut by saying it was a beta site. No longer; it might say "beta" on each page, but it's evident that development ceased weeks ago (probably as soon as Orkut's stupid launch party occurred). It's abandonware, folks, so do the appropriate thing: remove your personal info and abandon your account.

Comments

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

Tribe is much better. :-)

We actually communicate pretty actively with our users, we thread our messages (though our discussion boards aren't spectacular), and we try to always be fair and evenhanded with our users. Our TOU enforcement guy is really good about explaining what rules you violated and what the penalty will be if you keep it up.

We don't have a delete-your-own-account button for a couple of reasons, but a quick note to support will unsubscribe you.

And besides, I work there.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Why don't you have a "delete your own account" button? I recently discovered the unsubscribe method, but had to mail support to do so; it then took several days to process it and I had TWO tech support people mail me to ask me why I was leaving.

Why no delete account

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

The reason "delete account" isn't user-visible is complicated and mired in internal history.

As you might imagine, deleting an account is a fairly complex operation. There's a lot of cleanup work that has to happen under the hood in order to leave things in a sane state. Unsubscribe was more of an afterthought than an up-front decision, and we got some of it wrong at first.

For that reason, we put unsubscribe in the hands of customer service rather than end users. That way, if we ran into a problem with it, we could just "hold the presses" on our side until the issue was resolved.

We've cleaned that all up now. "Is it time to expose unsubscribe to users?" is a discussion that we've had recently, but it hasn't yet made it to the development schedule. We've been rather busy, and new functionality always seems to wind up higher on the priority list.

There's a bit more than that wrapped up in it, but that's the high-level summary of why the button isn't there.

As for two customer service responses, we recently added a second CS person, and I think they're working out the bugs in their own internal processes. I'll make sure Walter knows that happened to you. We do ask everyone who unsubscribes why they're leaving, and the information we get back is quite interesting.

[tongodeon.livejournal.com]

You want to delete your account because you suspect that Orkut deletes accounts of people who say unpopular things?

Sounds like a chance to test your hypothesis, kill two birds with one stone, and have some fun in the process.

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

See also the section of Rone's original post marked "Corollary". :-)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ah, but i did. I posted this to "Antisocial Networks". I'm going over there now to check out what sort of lame-ass retorts i've garnered.

[damienw]

Well, I just got there, and already I am finding many of my friends old and new very easily, which hasn't happened in my brief flirtation with Tribe. Some of the things you talk about are clearly v. annoying, but meh, mostly that's what I use LJ for.

I'll check on it from time to time for a month or so before I get bored, I imagine.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

The problem with Orkut seems to be twofold.

First, as the product of a single researcher's work, support is reduced to an individual's flailing catchup between paying work. (for Google|university, read paying|class). So improvements are going to be hard to come by, even nontechnical infrastructure like typos in menus.

Second, sheep mentality applies. People are leaving in droves. Communities that had dozens or hundreds of posts a day are now moribund. If there's nothing for me, there's no reason for me to be there.

Most of the complaints about Orkut seem displaced to me. But they're also the complaints repeatedly cited as grounds for dropping out. Being unable to delete your own account is a (relatively) simple infrastructure problem (see problem one) made complex largely because of the noise made about it. Insisting on leaving because you're not allowed to leave is circular and somewhat petty. If you really need your personal info secured, zero it out and abandon the account.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The "sheep mentality" thing is the two-edged sword for orkut; without it, it wouldn't be a 'household name'.

Most of the complaints about it also don't seem important to me. And the inability to delete your own account isn't per se a problem, but rather, in my view, a symptom of the inattention that is what i consider to be the biggest problem with orkut.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

As someone who develops web applications, I'm getting kind of depressed by the recent hoo-hah about Orkut sucking.

While on one hand I want to share my work with everyone, the other hand wants to cover my face and run away. I guess it's just a harsh reality that we'll never be able to make everyone happy.

If what we're told is true, Orkut is some guy's project. It's not a production app. It's a dev project.

I had someone come in and talk to me about his project today, and he was REALLY UPSET because there was no search interface for him to look at yet. Of course, we hadn't discussed what needed to be searched on (there's lots of XML-encoded metadata, plus full-text searching), and the engine to do the searching hasn't been built yet. He also won't be happy to hear that he probably won't have anything to look at until April, since I am working on four other projects right now. I am not even going to change a typo for two weeks, because I'm doing other things.

I'm glad that it's just this one guy ragging on me, though, and not the whole interwebnet.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The thing is that he's already released it to tens of thousands of people, and even had himself a little "launch party". You can't have it both ways; if it's a development site, limit the amount of testers and follow up aggressively to feedback. If it's a production site, it should be up to snuff as far as reliability and features go. In this case, it's neither. Couple that with the "all your info are belong to us" 'privacy' policy and you gotta ask, what's in it for me?

[mrbalihai.livejournal.com]

remove your personal info.

Given Orkut's woeful lack of a decent privacy policy, I can't imagine why anyone would've given them valid personal info to begin with, almost all of mine has been bogus from Day 1.

[merde.livejournal.com]

now i feel extra smug for not having bothered to join.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Darn you and your smugness to heck, lady!

... it was a moment of weakness, i swear...

[opadit.livejournal.com]

... and leaving me TWISTING IN THE WIND with my invitation. How humiliating.