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Remember when albums used to get a fair shake on G+?

They seem to get greatly demoted distribution now. That's a shame, since that punishes and discourages the sharing of content to G+.

Trying out the new Collections feature…

Originally shared by +Jeff Sullivan

My first upload of a sizable batch of my better recent photos onto Google+. (Out here in the boonies in the Eastern Sierra my only Internet connection is a slow Sprint cell phone, so I've been avoiding it!) Enjoy, and thanks in advance for any +1s and shares!

        

In Album New Photos Spring 2011 (29 photos)

Comments

17 thoughts on “Remember when albums used to get a fair shake on G+?”

  1. Love looking at your photo albums. You are a gifted photographer and I think when I look at your "Bodie" shots, you are a young man with an old soul!
    The Perseid Meteor video is amazing and gives a glimpse of the heavens those of us in the city will never see.
    Thanks for the information you share with your "fans," I, being on of them. Great work!

  2. I hear ya +Jeff Sullivan. I also really wonder why the photos app felt the need to rename "albums" to "collections" when those are not even the same as these new G+ collections. I do seem to be getting a lot of random visitors to the collections so collections must be promoted somewhere.
    Beautiful photography as always!

  3. +Michael B. Stuart I had noticed a drop in responses to (distribution of?) my regular posts on G+ over the past month, and these initial Collection posts seem to be doing pretty well (and resulting in more comment engagement), so perhaps Google is routing views and engagement over to a new algorithm.
    I also notice that many people favored for the past 4 years, and many recently favored, still have astronomical views, comments and shares, so while Google separated that sort of in-stream promotion from the visible suggested user list in mid-2012, their intent and practice of favoring certain people over others remains absolutely unchanged.
    Part of the effectiveness of my account on G+ was flicked off like a light switch on June 20, 2013. I haven't had time to deal with it while I finished my book, but attempts to engage Google in discussions or via support requests has yielded no response (punishment if anything), so I may take up the matter with regulators to see if they can get to the bottom of it. G+ is recognized as critical to Google Search placement, which is critical to small business success, so any bias imposed on G+ by Google can have devastating effects. In a Citizens United world, perhaps a cash-rich company like Google can ultimately buy its way out of anything, but how Google employees sleep at night eludes me.

  4. Other than for my personal info, it is pretty useless to share anything here, almost none attention from anyone. Only people who got their names known in start of + are popular now

  5. Matej: Your response is as important to me and others as It gives us an idea of the likes and dislikes of different cultures and opinions. Don't stop posting your comments, please. I always open the comments to read what everyone has to say.

  6. +Matej Rajčan As of May 15, 2012, approximately 30 photographers had been promoted by Google to contact levels 20X to 40X the contact levels achieved organically by others: https://plus.google.com/photos/+JeffreySullivan/albums/5742657988262280417/5742657989404078962?authkey=CJqSvpaEhf-7owE&pid=5742657989404078962&oid=%2BJeffreySullivan

    I was in the vast majority of photographers ignored by Google for that first year or so, but in the top 10 of them, so I was personally impacted. In mid-2012 many new photographers were added to the publicly visible list of recognized photographers, but they did not get the same level of post promotion of those original photographers, who continued to get promotion of their posts to high engagement levels (regardless of whether or not their accounts received visible contacts).

    Google still appears to choose photographers to promote, both with additional contacts and highly promoted posts: https://plus.google.com/+WilliamPatinoPhotography/posts

    Since G+ post performance is a major component of SEO ranking, which is very important for small businesses these days, Google manipulating G+ strikes me as rigging markets. I've even been harassed by people for simply observing the facts here, and those people who harassed me were then rewarded by Google employees who were rewarded back with personal financial gain. Rewarding thuggish behavior while rigging markets for personal gain doesn't seem all that different to me from the business model of the Mafia.

    I have gotten nowhere talking to Google employees, submitting reports to G+, posting on this topic, or contacting G+ executives. Instead, my account seems to have been disabled from the addition of contacts, circle shares were not working for my account (even as I tried to invite social media influencers to G+), and for the most part my post distribution has crashed.

    Four years is about enough of this though, don't you think +Eric Schmidt? You benefited greatly from my conversion of Netscape from SGI to Sun Microsystems servers, selling them $20,000,000.00 worth for development of Netscape's server software, establishing Sun as "the Internet server company". SunSoft was kicked out of Netscape at one point for being too arrogant; I got them back in. I sold the first Sun workstation to Yahoo's founders; I dropped off the quote while they were in a meeting with Scott McNealy. I sold the first big $4M sale to Inktomi. Your life could have been very different. Mine certainly is, due to the ways I've been treated by Google for the first year of G+ and for teh past 2 years since my G+ account was demoted by a competitor working at Google on June 20, 2013.

  7. +Matej Rajčan That was noticed by hundreds or thousands of photographers in 2011 and 2012, and many shared their opinion with the G+ community managers at the time, but Google seemed immune to feedback, so they left. The site's strange obsession with sloppily edited photos continues. any child can make an image look strange, a much greater challenge is to edit a photo while preserving the realism. That was the strength of photographers like Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell, they could spend hours in a a darkroom exercising their creativity, yet when they were done the first thing you noticed about the resulting image was the subject of the photo, not clownish adjustments. Apparently the folks managing G+ did not care much about such things, and still don't. For whatever, reason, Google just have so much money to pour into G+ that user growth and retention, and the ability of users to form their own communities and determine and control their own success, must not matter much. I mention these things from time to time only because I like Google and want to see it succeed; it is sad to see such an excellent and promising technology fail to catch on, for really simple, basic (and to so many people so obvious) reasons. Google is like a beloved family member with a substance abuse problem. Sometimes caring intervention is required to encourage the addict to seek help and behavioral change. Surely four years of corrupted and deeply counterproductive algorithms is enough.

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