Context:
Saving of public Google+ content at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine by the Archive Team has begun
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/az285j/saving_of_...
Previously on HN:
Saving of public Google+ content at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine by the Archive Team has begun
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/az285j/saving_of_...
Previously on HN:
A Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier[1] is a hellhole.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/185435/diary-of-a-n...
I've yet to see these things happen to HN.
Roughly 2.6M views a day, 300K daily uniques, 3 to 3.5M monthly uniques. It depends on how you count, of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098
Which ... actually probably compares favourably with Google+, which had a core of about 50-100k highly active users (posting 50-100x monthly), and maybe an extended set of as much as 100 million who'd interacted with the site at one time or another significantly.
I've done a fair bit of measurement (limited by available resources and indicators), and one conclusion I'm coming to is that raw numbers do a pathetic job of indicating media or forum vitality. Most especially raw census numbers.
Looking at G+ communities, and running grid plots of engagements, it turned out that posts drove other engagement, not members, and in fact it seems as if there's some kind of fall-off (at least on a per-member basis) when a given forum gets above about 5,000 members (though I need to check this).
Google had more users. But they were spread out over a vastly larger set of forums and discussion, there was no central "square" (as with HN's "new" or "news" pages), moderation was exceedingly uneven, and often entirely absent, and there were (and remain) huge barriers for like minds to come together.
HN's overall focus is fairly (but not excessively) narrow, and much of the conversation takes itself too seriously (and certainly myself), but relative to the rest of the Net it's an exemplar. Good conversation remains exceedingly hard to find.
Yes, this was something particular to G+. Incidentally see these in Linus interview [0], HN post [1]
" The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control"
"I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere)"
[0] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/25-years-later-intervie...
It has been proven again and again, over thousands of year but especially recently that the real valuable data is often in the raw notes of a research and not the published material. git allows you, very easily, to destroy history just to make the log prettier later. Instead, it should allow you to construct a hierarchy of logs and hide the nonimportant details but allow it to be shown later. Similarly, git reset --hard should not throw away work, that's criminal https://gist.github.com/chx/85db0ebed1e02ab14b1a65b6024dea29 fixes it but bah.
Back to topic: when there are hundreds of thousands of public posts, the mind boggles you are asking whether there's any value to it. There's no question some of it is valueable. I do not know how to impress this mindset where losing information created by people is henious, unthinkable.
That said, the company's proved less than helpful to date in the process of the G+ shutdown.
And incompetence is difficult to distinguish from malevolence.