
Ask HN: Where are all the devs on Google Plus? - emperorcezar
I keep reading that Google plus is used by devs. Every time I jump on there it&#x27;s a ghost town. Am I just looking in the wrong places?
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mohanmcgeek
They updated it about a year ago, breaking all the old links. Now nobody goes
there.

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mcv
I'm on there, though mostly for the vibrant RPG community.

Whether it looks like a ghost town depends on how many people you are
following, and which communities you're a member of. And whether you've
configured those communities to actually show all of their content in your
stream, which is something you have to do manually for every community you're
in. So that's a pain.

Google has been trying to hard to chase people out of Google+, but people are
still holding on, because there isn't really any good alternative. It's a
shame to see Google undermining their own platform like this, though.

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ocdtrekkie
I've used Google+ as my primary social network for a long time, and in the
last year, it's been drastically quieter. The whole "ghost town" thing used to
be kinda a gag, now it's kinda for real.

Also, "all the devs" in Google+'s case, primarily means "all the Googlers"
plus a variety of people who dev primarily on Google platforms and hence want
to follow all those Googlers.

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acchow
Who thought "Google Plus" was a good idea for a name? It even sounds
ridiculous to say.

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Sylos
I don't know, if there's anything to it, but I once heard that Google Plus was
originally not planned to be a social network and rather was supposed to be a
way for celebrities and companies and such to provide additional information
about themselves, which would then get displayed in the Google Search results.

And like, for that the name would actually make somewhat sense.

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ocdtrekkie
My understanding was just that since Google+, as a "social feature" was
supposed to be integrated with everything Google. (See the controversial
merges into Gmail, YouTube, etc.) So it was kinda Google+Social. So like an
upgrade to Google, rather than being a separate, distinct site like it's seen
now.

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mcv
Google doesn't really seem to understand their own product. Most people
love(d) it as an independent social network because its features are way
better than those of Facebook and others, but Google keeps messing it up by
nerfing or removing popular features, adding useless ones, integrating it with
the low-quality comments on Youtube, not showing everything you want to see,
showing things you don't want to see (the hated "+1 sharing"), etc.

It could have been fantastic, but Google seems determined to kill it. Lately
I've seen very enthusiastic early fans leave Google+ and just submit to the
horror that is Facebook, because at least that's predictable.

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ryanmaynard
Aside from HN, perhaps you could try:

* IRC Channels

* Twitter (search by profile contents and/or hashtags)

* Mastodon? Still a bit unproven, but the atmosphere there resembles the 90s web.

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ubersec
mastodon has a few. try the tech instance or sec one

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thebosz
Just a small corner for a small language, but the Dart group is pretty active
and is where I get my news:
[https://plus.google.com/communities/114566943291919232850](https://plus.google.com/communities/114566943291919232850)

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Rondom
Quite a few Linux devs are on G+: Linus, Greg Kroah-Hartman, David Airlie,
Lennart Pöttering, ...

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nthcolumn
Yeh dev here who shunned fb et al initially - the're heaps of communities but
you can't display a snippet? Hands up I created some of them but am wondering
what the point was... teeny-tiny bit of markdown would make it really
adequate.

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relics443
I know there are devrels from the Android team that are pretty active in the
communities there.

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clavalle
Well, more than other populations which, these days, isn't saying much.

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orev
devs need to spend time actually focusing on something, not wasting time on
shallow stuff like social media. If they do, they're going to pick a social
media site that has a better payoff than G+

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cocomar1
It IS a ghost town.

