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.
So, how long have you both worked at Google?
Got 'em
Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#12Good question because google has killed so many other projects people do rely on (eg: google reader!)
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#13Because you can't kill something that's already dead.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#14I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#15Many people, my wife included, use it regularly. Does it seem like a ghost town to you? Well, we just aren't sharing with you.
> Many people, my wife included, use it regularly. That's all I needed to hear. Google+ is the most legit social networking site now.
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+.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#16Because 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#17because 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"....
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#18Personally, 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).
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#19Same 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google killed Google Plus?
#20More work to remove it than leave it chained to a fence as a zombie?
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.