>We have seen critical appraisals of past social media launches, e.g., "Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement" (2012) <https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-stu...>

This was nearly a year after G+ launched. The article in question here is about three weeks after the launch of threads. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me...

I picked a particular item with significant HN discussion. The fact that it was data-backed (a 40k profile analysis) also means that it lags actual activity. As with all complex evolving situations, hard empirical data are not realtime.

The "ghost town" label had been stuck on G+ within the first few weeks, yes.

HN discussion from September 2011 (G+ launched in July):

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019699>

Numerous HN takes in comments from June -- September 2011: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1316822400&dateRange=custom&...>

And, FWIW, at the time I was contesting the characterisation of G+. I distinctly recall the discussions and press coverage, however.

Way too much conflation with labels, timelines, types of project, recollections from 12 years ago, etc. for me. Also we're comparing Meta, a company with experience running two successful social networks against Google of ten plus years ago, with none.

Your original position was "We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users".

I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison being made over a decade ago.

In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely credible.

Google of a decade ago had launched Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).

The Social space is immensely fickle, and the ability of even an established industry giant to succeed with a new venture is fairly thin. Facebook has largely bought rather than made its own follow-on successes to date (as did Google in buying YouTube).

>Google of a decade ago had launched Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).

Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical. Additionally you're propping up a failed application which wasn't even a social network as a success.

As I said, your comparisons included far too much conflation of several varieties for me to take them seriously.

Then s/launched/running successful social networks/, which again in this case was your original position.

We have now:

- Long standing critical takes on new social media launches and claimed performance.

- Google as "running ... successful social networks".

You're litigating pedantry in a counterfactual manner. It's tedious.

I've shown this twice, which is sufficient for my tastes.

My comment was about news articles and you opened it up to HN threads and academic papers and whatever else. You hand waved away the fact that your timelines were vastly different, and are now complaining about pedantry when in several cases basic facts eluded you which changed your arguments when edited. You continually paraphrase my comment in an incomplete manner in order to serve your view.

No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.

Could you just be specific about why the first example brought up doesn't apply, instead of letting the other person put themselves out there to advance the discussion and finding little details to accuse them of bad faith?

The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad faith is weird.

I did regarding the timelines, then they pivoted to including HN threads in the comparison when my original statement was about articles. I don't know what you're talking about regarding Google Video, I did not mention it.

To lift the kimono:

It's often easier to search within a specific timeframe on Hacker News itself given Algolia search's excellent date-range functions, and the fact that HN itself is strongly time-oriented. There are doubtless other stories elsewhere, but it would be more tedious to track those down and verify that they actually came from the period under consideration.

It's also possible to search via comments, with one useful set of terms being "Google+" and "ghost town", an assessment which was being thrown about early on.

And we can link directly to the HN threads and see what contemporaneous discussions were like and how they characterised the issue at the time.

By contrast, date-ranged General Web Search on, say, DuckDuckGo or Google is often confounded by Web pages which have inaccurate date indicia, or have been misclassified as to time by search engines. It's much more tedious to try to find specific content matching time criteria, though the universe of total such articles is obviously larger. Fortunately for this case, Google+ was of sufficient interest to HN that there were numerous submissions concerning it submitted early on, many of course highly syncophantic, but also concerning the rather fumbling rollout and weak adoption.

Amongst other possible archives, Google+ itself is no longer extant, and so cannot be searched. Its own search features did not afford date-ranged search, though I'm well aware that there was much early hand-wringing over the "brutally unfair" stories (in the framing of G+ advocates) circulating at the time.

Reddit might be another useful trove, though I'm avoiding that for the time being. Search there is limited to only the initial story title and, in a limited number of cases, the "self-text" content of text-based posts. Pointedly, comments aren't searchable on Reddit itself, and so the potential match space is far more constrained than it is on Hacker News.

Despite those limitations, in answering your own historically uninformed vague hand wave that the response to Facebook's Threads launch is exceptional, I'd given numerous specific and quantified examples from a roughly comparable time period for Google's G+ launch strongly suggesting otherwise.

Yes, the data I brought to bear are subject to a strong availability heuristic. But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.

Cheers.

For the last time: articles, written by journalists, within three weeks of the launch of the network. I'm tiring of you again fallaciously modifying my argument.

>But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.

Are you seriously asking me to prove a negative? I'm saying the article doesn't exist. From someone who had the gall to suggest I was being tedious, to writing this? Please for your own sake, stop and spend your time elsewhere.

Waze was an acquisition. It was launched by an Israeli company.

Fair enough, noted in edit above.

As Facebook did with Instagram and Whatsapp.

And with the facebook.com domain name, Parakey, ConnectU, FriendFeed, Octazen, Divvyshot, Friendster patents, ShareGrove, Zenbe, Nextstop, Chai Labs, Hot Potato, Drop.io, FB.com domain name, Rel8tion, Beluga, Snaptu, RecRec, DayTum, Sofa, MailRank, Push Pop Press, Friend.ly, Strobe, Gowalla, Caffeinatedmind, Instagram, Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox.com, Karma, Face.com, Spool, Acrylic Software, Threadsy, Atlas Solutions, osmeta, Storylane (Mixtent), Hot Studio, Spaceport, Parse, Monoidics, Jibbigo, Onavo, SportStream, Little Eye Labs, Branch, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Ascenta, Salorix, ProtoGeo Oy, PrivateCore, LiveRail, WaveGroup Sound, Wit.ai, Quickfire Networks, TheFind, Inc., Surreal Vision, Endaga, Pebbles, MSQRD (Masquerade), Two Big Ears, Nascent Objects, Infiniled, CrowdTangle, Faciometrics, Zurich Eye, Ozlo, Fayteq AG, tbh, Confirm, Bloomsbury AI, Redkix, Vidpresso, Dreambit, Chainspace, GrokStyle, Servicefriend, CTRL-labs, Packagd, Beat Games, PlayGiga, Sanzaru Games, Scape Technologies, Giphy, Mapillary, Ready at Dawn, Lemnis Technologies, Kustomer, Downpour Interactive, Unit 2 Games, BigBox VR, AI.Reverie, Within, Twisted Pixel Games, Presize, Lofelt, Armature Studio, and Camouflaj.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...>

Neither Google nor Facebook are distinctive within the tech sector in aequiring large numbers of other firms.