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.
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.
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.
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.
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+
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.
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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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 41.1 ms ] threadAlso, "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.
And like, for that the name would actually make somewhat sense.
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.
* IRC Channels
* Twitter (search by profile contents and/or hashtags)
* Mastodon? Still a bit unproven, but the atmosphere there resembles the 90s web.
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.