Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+

Re:Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+ by Bartweiss on Sunday August 02, 2015 @01:42PM (#9991511)

Google did manage to strike the worst possible balance of size and network effects. Facebook was good because everyone was on Facebook - Google+ was bad because everything else was on Google.

The positive network effect of social media is that it helps you find everyone you want to talk to. The negative effect is that it denies you the ability to compartmentalize your behavior - to talk about indie bands on Pitchfork, and then secretly enjoy Nirvana on Youtube.

Google+ didn't have any active users, so it lost the positive network effect, but it was incredibly aggressive about forcing you to use it in every place possible (and with more sharing than you wanted). The result was that they only got a loss of compartmentalization, without any actual social benefit.

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Re:Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+ by dredmorbius on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @12:56AM (#10001744)

Thank you. That's an excellent expression of Google's negative value proposition IMO as a social network.

I actually somewhat like G+. But because Google has so much of the rest of my life, I'm:

1. Not willing to participate on G+ as "me" under a real name.

2. I'm going to withdraw as much other content from G+ as possible.

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