== How the modern web 2.0 social web irritates me by hiding discussions Recently [[an interesting discussion https://plus.google.com/115547683951727699051/posts/bBR2vpG8uQ1]] of [[my entry on what systemd gets right ../linux/SystemdRight]] broke out on Google+, including both interesting stuff and some things that I want to respond to. What sucks about the modern Web 2.0 social web is that I found this discussion basically only through luck. Oh, I knew that someone on Google+ had linked to my entry and had a bunch of readers; I could see the _Referer_s from plus.url.google.com come rolling in in my web server logs. But in common with a lot of other Web 2.0 sites the _Referer_ values were of absolutely no use to backtrack to [[the actual discussion https://plus.google.com/115547683951727699051/posts/bBR2vpG8uQ1]]; they were encoded and basically generic (if I visited one of them I wound up on a little interstitial 'you are about to visit an outside website, are you sure?' page). This is more severe than [[my earlier irritation with Twitter about this PettyTwitterIrritation]] in that G+ is actually hiding a real discussion from me (okay, people have real discussions on Twitter too but perhaps not quite as much), a discussion that in many other circumstances might have happened in the comments section of my entry (where I could directly see it and address it). Of course this is partly the result of a deliberate design decision on G+'s part; G+ *wants* you to have your discussion on G+, not on some outside site. From Google's perspective what happened here is not a bug but a feature. (This is unlike a similar issue with Facebook because the discussion here on G+ is public, not private.) This is nothing new, of course. I just feel like grumbling about it since I was so directly reminded of it. === Sidebar: How I found this discussion Someone in my Twitter stream had linked to [[an earlier Lennart Poettering G+ post https://plus.google.com/115547683951727699051/posts/74r518xVUNH]] that reacted to the whole 'FLOS vs Unix' thing and mentioned systemd in relation to that. It struck me that if anyone on G+ was going to link to my entry at this point it might well be Poettering, so I backtracked to his G+ page and there it was. Had his earlier post not appeared on my radar I would have had no real clue. (I knew that Poettering knew about my entry because he left some comments on it.)