this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I think we're probably making a mistake if we think these platforms could have been successful in the long run if only their benevolent dictators had been more competent. In the end it's a failure of the entire business model; it seems impossible for these companies to survive without becoming evil.
I bet Google is currently breathing a sigh of relief nobody ever cared to use Google Plus.
Not even a meme…. What was google plus? I’ve had a gmail for like 15 years so I must’ve just missed it.
It was a social media site made by Google to compete with big dogs like Facebook, twitter in the early 2010s. Was kind of a ghost town because mostly no one used it and also gained infamy because youtube forced everyone to make g plus accounts to make comments on videos. This backfired badly and the yt community protested hard against this so the requirement had to be removed. It then again became a ghost town and shut down eventually in 2019.
If I recall, it was a ghost town because Google was very stingy with its invitations. I don’t know if they were having problems scaling, or if they were trying to generate hype. But progress was so slow that Google Plus was unable to reach critical mass.
At the time Facebook was starting to seriously suck and Google was still a trusted brand, but it failed mostly because of the invite system for the first few weeks. Google themselves closed the door to the possibility of huge migration.
You got an invite, but none of your facebook frieds did. It was an empty town so one naturally started adding random people, thus fucking the friend reccomendation algorythm forever. When they finally opened to the general public, people had lost interest already.
Their circles concept was actually awesome, but they shot themselves in the foot in trying to keep it exclusive for those first few weeks.