It always irks me when they say “few loyal users”, like there were 12 of us or something. I have no idea of how many regular users there were. But we were a community. I feel the same way about losing G+ as losing the active community on YouTube before they drove us out in favour of haters and racists.
I am still posting on G+ but I moved to Pluspora.
I am still posting on G+ but I moved to Pluspora.
With facebuk reporting 2 trillion or some BS number, the 150 million or so G+ gathered just don't impress.
ReplyDelete❨❨❨David C. Frier❩❩❩ Facebook's membership is probably 5% legitimately people who are dead in real life, 20-30% dead profiles (probably higher than that, IMO) and half of the rest of them being bots and scammers. Even with Facebook's active population, most of Facebook's real "active" population probably post as little as I do these days.
ReplyDeleteVoid of Space and Time I deleted my facebuk two years ago
ReplyDeleteAny Google service that doesn't explode in popularity gets canned. I'm sure the numbers are a drop in the bucket next to Gmail or YouTube or Facebook or Twitter.
ReplyDeleteLoyal since 2012
ReplyDeleteThe point was to stop us. Nothing more, nothing less. We are to smart and awake. Same tactic over and over.
ReplyDeleteBrass Tack It’s not about freedom of speech. It was the freedom from advertising that did in G+. The privacy and control that we loved advertisers hated, because they couldn’t track views, impressions, or other measure to show that they were reaching people through G+.
ReplyDeleteThe Google+ numbers look pretty damn good. weareflint.co.uk - We are Flint
ReplyDeleteMudhooks yeah, there is that. One thing I'd really like to get from G+ is a sense of what the active userbase really is.
ReplyDeleteI've maintained just under 3,000 followers over the years, and probably have a few hundred overall in my active Circles. I've blocked something like 10,000+ profiles.
The fact that I can't even readily get counts of these has been a long-standing sore point for me.
Pluspora has seen over 3,000 registrations in the past few days, and I suspect that is a fair fraction of at least the active group I interact with.
I'd measured the public-posting activity of G+ in 2015 (and Stone Temple Consulting replicated methods on a much larger sample) suggesting about 6 million or so "real" users with public posting, at least once. The 30-day and 1-year activity levels were far lower:
100+ posts, past 30 days: ~53,000
50+ posts, past 30 days: ~105,000
10+ posts, past 30 days: 1.9 million
5+ posts, past 30 days: 4.3 million
1+ posts, last 30 days: 16 million
10 or more posts EVER: 21.8 million
(That's a fair cut-off in my opinion for truly active users, and corresponds with the size of almost all pre-Facebook social networks -- 30-50 million was very difficult to exceed.)
5+ posts ever and 1+ posts ever: 32m and 112m respectively.
Stone Temple (and I) both looked at private posting activity and tried to suss out how much accounts might be doing only this. The evidence suggest ... not that much, though there may be a very large number of not-very-active profiles. Private-only profiles had on average 4.3% of the profile views of publicly-active ones.
Keep in mind that G+'s total profile count is enormous. It was about 2.2 billion in early 2015, when Stone Temple and I did our analysis, it's well above 3 billion now. This is because most Android and Gmail registrations, as well as other Google services (YouTube, Voice, etc.) created G+ profiles. (A practice I believe has been discontinued.) So even 9% of a Very Large Number is ... considerably large.
stonetemple.com - Hard Numbers for Public Posting Activity on Google Plus
Brass Tack "Free speech" applies specifically in the United States, and specifically to the US Government (and through various extensions, other governmental actions).
ReplyDeleteThe G+ shutdown is many things. It is NOT a free-speech issue.
It is a media issue. It is a platform issue. It is a safety and security issue. It is a business issue. It is a technical issue. It is a social issue. It is a personal issue.
But let's stick to reality-based discussion, please.
Edward Morbius I'd argue it could be an office politics issue at Google. I don't think G+ was ever any of their passion projects and was likely segmented from the start. But that's just a guess.
ReplyDeleteVoid of Space and Time Just ever so slightly, yes ;-)
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius But, if you know anything about the mess that is Valve's office politics, I think it's likely Google has a similar issue with just how many projects they host and how many companies they absorb. Valve now no longer works on anything other than Steam and VR, just like Google seems to slowly be giving up on their more experimental projects. I mean, they've pretty much given up on their VR division as well.
ReplyDeleteVoid of Space and Time There's a post mortem I'm sort of drafting in my head of this, suggesting that a major problem within the tech world isn't adequately addressing start-ups, but in addressing not-shutting-downs.
ReplyDeleteSilicon Valley didn't jump the shark when a company entered the Shutting-Down as a Service market segment, Shutdownify, but rather, when Shutdownify itself shut down....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229
The story of Shutdownify, the best metaphor Silicon Valley never had
http://www.dailydot.com/technology/shutdownify-startup-shuts-down/