>That being said, Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users? is an incredibly loaded question and I think my tone might have stemmed from that.
It doesn't seem very loaded to me. The implication is simply that G+ is bad. Nothing more. That's a reasonable implication for someone to make. It's not a 'have you stopped beating your wife' type of question.
Or the other obvious interpretation is - they place pretty much zero value on their users (or perhaps even a negative value on those whiny privacy conscious tech-crowd users that hang out on commie un-monetized sites like HN…).
Because the title implies that Google does not think that G+ is something users would want. There are people who genuinely like G+ and maybe even think it's awesome that YouTube now is so tightly integrated with it. So a title implying that Google did G+ because they wanted to exploit ad dollars from users without caring about the users themselves, IS a "did you stop hitting your wife"-like question.
Because the "value" that Google generates from (toa very good first approximation) everything they do – comes from advertisers not "users". While the saying "if you're not paying for it, you're the _product_" is old and overused – any pragmatic view of Google's motivations needs to take into account that in any engineering/marketing/management argument about a user-impacting decision, "but this is what the advertisers want" is going to jold _way_ more sway than "but maybe as many as a few hundred thousand privacy conscious users might (gasp!) SIGN AN ONLINE PETITION!"
(And cynical-me suspects there's been a meeting going something like "Hey Sergey? Notice how there's been all these revelations about us snitching everyone's private email to the NSA?" "Yeah Larry, what of it? We seem to be getting away with it - it hasn't even registered a blip in our revenue/profit charts." "Yeah, _that's_ my point. The stupid fucking general public DON'T GIVE A DAMN. You know all those requests our advertisers keep making about tracking real identities across the entire internet? We could _so_ do that!" "Yeah, but what about our 'Don't be evil' motto?" "Sergey, do I have to threaten you with leaking your redtube browsing history _again?_")
It doesn't seem very loaded to me. The implication is simply that G+ is bad. Nothing more. That's a reasonable implication for someone to make. It's not a 'have you stopped beating your wife' type of question.