How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus (2016)

As someone who used Google Plus heavily for Android modification/custom ROM forums, I'm sad at how they ended up closing. The lack of popularity meant that there were much fewer if at all any (noticeable) bots, or low effort content. I wish companies like Google believed in their product(s), especially when they were amazing (looking at you, Inbox).

(If anyone's got a good Inbox replacement, especially if it's FOSS/self hosted, please let me know!)

(Edit - if the title could be edited to add 2016, that would be great!)

I, for one, really liked G+.

The linux community was very active. So was mostly all kinds of specific DIY discussion forums. Hobbyist & hacking forums too. For me the visually appealing part was the historical timeline visualization (posts on both L/R around a stem). Some things were done nice.

If they had made it optional, and focussed efforts on the good stuff - circles/forums discovery, features like easier Drive integration/video Meetup like instant chat within circles - and probably sent a social message it was for the cool/nerd/l33t folks, it could have made a splash. Instead Vic Gundotra was shoving it down everyone's throat & their Google activity - and given the confusing nature of private/public viewable information on G+, you weren't sure whether some racy stuff you might be watching in your downtime might show up in activity feed. (It did for Google buzz). Many folks were signing out of Google before they did other stuff, because you didn't want your video watch history or similar, show up in your feed.

Poor conceptualization killed an otherwise good prospect.

How might the world have been different if Google in retreating from Google+ had acquired Twitter?

https://www.quora.com/Why-has-Google-not-acquired-Twitter-ye...

Google got off lucky when plus failed. Note the differing fates of the two companies.

Previously, in 2016, with ninety-six comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830108