Ask HN: Where are all the devs on Google Plus? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where are all the devs on Google Plus?

16 pointsemperorcezar17 comments

I keep reading that Google plus is used by devs. Every time I jump on there it's a ghost town. Am I just looking in the wrong places?

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They updated it about a year ago, breaking all the old links. Now nobody goes there.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I forgot to add Lobste.rs

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

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

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

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

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

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+

It IS a ghost town.

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