> google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people.
Naive question here from a non-user: With all that goodness, why did the product fail?
Naive question here from a non-user: With all that goodness, why did the product fail?
First and foremost, it's a Google product. Google's own internal structural failings are predisposed to create and then kill products.
It had a different usage model ("Circles") to the things people already had and understood. Twitter, Facebook etc. And it didn't map clearly to those existing understood structures.
It was more complicated for end users, was unintuitive and badly explained. I didn't "get it" until someone either on HN or Reddit explained how it was supposed to work.
Google tried to use Google+ to replace YouTube comments. Something YouTube users didn't want, something it wasn't good at, and something that was badly communicated and extremely badly received. People actively resented the product as a result.
Google mishandled some big issues. Requiring "real names" went down like a lead balloon, something they had to walk back years later, but not before using it to replace YouTube comments.
It could have been lucrative and sticky glue between Google properties. Instead it was the crappy old spiderweb you accidentally get stuck to your face while cleaning out the shed.
Whereas for me, circles were amazing to both send and receive. I have a group of friends that are interested in photography, and a group of friends interested in computers, and a group for astronomy and philosophy and bicycling and whatnot. So I can place people and or they can subscribe to what they want to see from me.
Similarly, people would create a circle of say interesting photographers, and you can then share that circle and copy that circle and modify that circle and subscribe to that circle.
What ended up happening for me is that after a bit of time, I had a daily feed that was just... way better than any algorithm or AI or ML or privacy-invasive company ever managed to accomplish. Just high quality stuff all around. But also my friends and followers also received better quality stuff from me, as I could tailor who gets to see what.
I also liked the interface at the time, seemed to actually use my wide screen monitor, be clean, and relatively uninvasive (open FB on a 32" monitor and you barely get more useful text than on the 6" phone to this day)
They're much more interested in instant gratification and mindless entertainment, which was sufficiently catered to on the original platforms, so the critical mass of people never switched over.
Another factor surely was that - at the time - reddit was another platform for high quality discussions on specific topics and made it much easier to find like minded people through the subreddit segmentation.
While the circle functionality worked decently in g+, you still had to actually create and join them, which meant it was too exclusionary and involved to really get going.
Instead of developing it further they forced plus logins onto youtube, and after struggling for a year with that, and seeing no meaningful adoption, they rolled everything back, and then sunset Plus.
See also Steve Yegge's platforms rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 Originally accidentally posted publicly to Google Plus