Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus? - eibrahim
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technofiend
Same reason everyone not Facebook hasn't yet given up and declared defeat?
This isn't Highlander: there can be more than one. Google+ has plenty of
active communities of people who choose not to use Facebook. Nothing wrong
with that.

~~~
sundarurfriend
In fact afaict G+ has a very different vibe from Facebook, so I think of it as
an alternative to Twitter rather than to Facebook - it generally feels like a
public discourse rather than a "share my baby pictures with homies" type vibe.
Except you have more than 160 characters (or whatever Twitter's new limit is),
so conversations can flourish much better.

There are multiple writer communities, DIY communities, Yoga/meditation
groups, sci-fi fan groups, etc., and a lot of android apps use their G+
communities as their support forum + user communications page. (And those are
just the ones I know of.)

For whatever reason, these kinds of "I don't use it and my friends don't use
it, so why does it exist" type posts and comments - which seem to happen
repeatedly here - are posted disproportionately more so with G+ than any other
minor but thriving network/forum /thingamagick.

~~~
soylentcola
That's also how I tend to use it. I think the main issue was that it was
positioned as "hey, we built a better Facebook!"

This was somewhat accurate IMO since I prefer the layout, features (many of
which Facebook added shortly after), and granular sharing (which Facebook most
certainly lacks).

The main issue I ran across was that Facebook continued to dominate in the
space because it was the first to gain a critical mass of users across a wide
spectrum. MySpace was big with the younger crowd but typically you didn't find
your mom, your boss, your barber alongside your friends and drinking buddies.

Facebook was the first big one where eventually all of your relatives (even
the ones who typically didn't care about "techie" stuff) and acquaintances
built a profile. So when G+ came out, most of my friends tried it out and
quickly realized that they would still need to cross-post things to Facebook
if they wanted to share with all of their contacts and not just those who like
trying out new things.

Without a common API or protocol, there was no way to just pick the service
you prefer and go on with your life. With email, I could switch from Hotmail
to Yahoo to Gmail (or even roll my own server) in search of the right setup
for my preferences. I could still email anyone who refused to give up their
AOL account or who used their work email.

Facebook-style social networking requires everyone to be on the same platform
in order for it to work. So instead of some people sticking with Facebook
while a big chunk slowly migrated to G+ or other competitors over the space of
a few years, you ended up with lots of people trying out G+ and getting
annoyed that only a few friends bothered to read/reply.

So now it's mostly used as more of a subreddit-style thing where you can have
topical groups rather than personal friends and acquaintances. I still do
think it's a shame they couldn't "build a better Facebook" because it would be
nice to have a few options for that type of thing. But unless some new player
can convince absolutely everyone you know to migrate, it just isn't happening
anytime soon.

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akud
I'm a regular Google+ user and I find it incredibly valuable. The fact that
there are fewer people on there is actually an asset - the people that do use
it do so because they have some topic they're interested in that they're
discussing with other interested parties. There's a lot of mathematicians,
scientists, and authors. In general, the average g+ user is much more
knowledgeable than on any other site.

Also, the actual features are super valuable. You can create collections with
varying levels of privacy for your posts. I use some private collections to
take notes, and post more well thought out content in the public versions of
those collections. The collections help me organize my thoughts, and I can see
different ideas emerging over time. I have a collection to talk about software
engineering practices, for example.

Also, being able to create private communities is nice. My wife and I have a
private community where we share things about our daughter - photos, things we
want to remember, things she's learning.

Overall, g+ has enriched my life.

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goalieca
Good question because google has killed so many other projects people do rely
on (eg: google reader!)

~~~
wybiral
That was over four years ago. It's time to move on with your life. You'll meet
other feeds and timelines...

~~~
thrill
It's still a sore spot. It was like a knife in the ribs. A really long knife.
Serrated. And floppy. Spinning, too. Laced with Carolina Reaper sauce.

~~~
thedaemon
With the death of Google Reader, I completely stopped reading feeds. It killed
a part of the internet for me.

~~~
gorbachev
Feedly is better than Google Reader ever was these days. The team there is
also super responsive to issues.

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BrandoElFollito
I agree that Feedly is great (using it right now to reply).

The support is however abysmal. I tried to raise two bugs for a year but
nobody cared to reply. They are at par with JetBrains.

In contrast, I did not have any hopes with Chrome but it ended up being worked
upon.

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ageofwant
Because millions of people are using it ? I use it daily, I'm subscribed to
~40 communities mostly tech and photography. The signal/noise ratio is way
better than facebook. I've not used facebook in several years so maybe it's
better now but it did not add anything to my live, quite the contrary, G+
does.

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kardianos
Many people, my wife included, use it regularly. Does it seem like a ghost
town to you? Well, we just aren't sharing with you.

~~~
H1Supreme
> Many people, my wife included, use it regularly.

That's all I needed to hear. Google+ is the most legit social networking site
now.

~~~
HelloNurse
If you haven't heard about this person's wife using Google+ it's a little bit
of anecdotical evidence that it's doing its job of supporting communities
rather than generically connecting people (like Facebook).

The user interface remains outstandingly bad, but I've never seen clickbait
links or scammers on Google+.

~~~
DarronWyke
I've seen plenty of spammers, though. People who tag you in things that have
nothing to do with you to only drop dodgy links.

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tn_
Personally, I haven't used google plus in awhile but when I used it, it wasn't
for the social networking of people I already knew, but it was for following
communities w/ topics that I liked.

The problem I'm finding with Facebook right now is I don't want to spam
everyone with science-y articles or to offend/bother people who might not care
for liberal view-points.. just because there are so many people that I know
that are on their network. Also, I'm too lazy to create groups to target my
posts with. It ends up just being a photo-dump with maybe written posts once a
month + mostly keeping brief tabs with family+friends.

When I first started on Fb, it was addicting posting things I could reference
later or writing long-ish essays or being ridiculous with friends (photoshop
wars).

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wodenokoto
When I visited a Google office a few years ago, I noticed that they are
heavily dogfooding Google +

Anythins that other bigCorps would use Exchange for, they use G+

This is stuff like looking up employees, across teams and entire organization,
etc.

~~~
away2017throw
Few years is eons in this field.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
More work to remove it than leave it chained to a fence as a zombie?

~~~
elicash
I think this is it. They knew their best way of beating Facebook was going to
be incorporating Plus as tightly into Google as possible. If you remember, it
even integrated into Google searches for a while in a very obvious way (though
they rolled back how visible that is).

I'm not a developer, but I'd imagine it's not a single thing they can remove,
that it's mixed into of every team's code, all over the place.

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jacquesm
At a guess because it would be admitting defeat.

At least they could drop the '+' idiocy from the search engine.

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wybiral
At my last job we used it internally (part of the G Suite, I believe) for
employee profile pages, especially since we used Hangouts and Gmail a lot to
communicate.

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_nalply
An important feature is OAuth2. Google+ is an identity provider. In other
words, Google+ is perhaps used a lot more than it seems. It's like an
underground infrastructure nobody sees.

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dovik
Because you can't kill something that's already dead.

~~~
_ao789
Thank God

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grizzlylabs
I always thought they should morph/change/add circles as a method to do
authentication, authorization and enterprise group permissions.

Imagine an Enterprise IT worker creating a Resource Circle called "Salesforce"
or "DropBox" and a user group called Marketing.

I would want it to work for inside private resources as well as public
resources. Same thing with user groups. Groups of employees, contractors and
outsiders.

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senectus1
because its a binary world.

if you're not using G+ you're using Facebook and I'm sure i'm not the only one
to say "F __* that "....

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dyeje
Probably a combination of hubris and it being cheaper to just let it sit there
then rip out all the integrations to other products.

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laurent123456
Maybe because of Google+, Facebook as 1 or 2% less users and Google thinks
that's good enough a reason to keep it alive.

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martiuk
I think they use it internally.

~~~
_ao789
..shame

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sigsergv
It's killing it slowly.

~~~
_ao789
"Killing me softly with his plus"

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Klockan
I think that Google plus is too integrated in things like youtube to be
killed.

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Grumbledour
I think it can only be a matter of time.

Not, that no one is using it. I am using it daily and at least the several
hundred people I follow do so too, there is quite a big community in tabletop
roleplaying games for example. But google has for years only done what they
always do to their products in recent years: add more and more whitespace
while taking away features. And of course, this drives people away. So it is
getting slowly quieter over there and of course, all it takes google to
finally close it down is one engineer finishing his 20% project for the "next
big thing" to replace it.

This will be a sad day for many communities on google plus, but at this stage
in googles life, nobody should be surprised by products just going away.

