If they'd just backed off in the nymwars, WE'D ALL BE OVER THERE NOW. Fucksakes.
I truly believe they are opening a gap that others could exploit. Microsoft, so late to this party, with their userbase and technical know-how, with a lot of their ill deeds from the past forgotten or forgiven. If they decided that they are going to do it right, and not try to exploit users, they could become a threat again. I wonder if they are capable of this anymore though.
Or, reddit, with their substantial userbase of young, technically advanced, and influential users - if they could figure out the scalability issues, they could launch a youtube competitor, for example, and LOTS of people would move there very quickly, even if it is not as good, because they are (so far) known to be pure, whereas google has now proven that is is not pure, and dishonest (do no evil).
It's certainly not easy, but my point is, it's a lot easier when influential and vocal technical users have turned on you, and the degree to which they've turned.
The sort of political and organizing power reddit has shown recently (say, with the SOPA campaign) is not thinkable on facebook or google+. An AMA on reddit has also become a required stop for actors/directors/authors etc. for promoting their latest projects. G+ can only dream of such reach and power and facebook is by design (and branding) not suitable for such "interactive-broadcasting" type of usage.
now, if you want to start to discuss effectivenes instead of size, take a look at slashcode voting system.
The tone of reddit is set more by downvoting rather than upvoting. Any post on proggit about any language people actually use gets voted down by an army of bots written in languages that people don't use. Also, they're a bunch of communists because they'll vote you down if you drop any hint that (1) you're in it for the money or (2) you care about business in any way.
Reddit's negativity might make it spam resistant, but it will repell mainstream audiences and prevent their expansion.
Yep, Yahoo! has a lot of chances of screwing it up, but it's also the largest online pseudonymous social network I can think of.
In Firefox, if you have DDG as your default search:
ctrl-k (next thing you type will be a search)
!g (A DDG "bang code," in this case "search google")
whatever (this search will be sent to google)
DDG gets better and better every day. I noticed recently that if you search for a street address DDG gives you a map result from open street map, and gives you links to bing, mapquest, google maps and open street map. It's great.
And btw the DDG bang code for google maps is "!gm" and the bang code for google news is "!gn".
Well, that and it was a pretty vacuous experience.