Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
Their email about shuttering went into a tab in Gmail and didn't spot it, a suddenly my entire YouTube channel was deleted.
Hundreds of hours of work of crafting early videos of Elite: Dangerous and the beauty of its simulated galaxy just gone.
Luckily backed up on a NAS but I've never put them back up.
Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and have been at or near the top of their categories for over a decade.
Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.
That is the number of Google accounts that didn’t go through the effort of disconnecting from / opting out of Google+. For a few years, all new accounts were automatically enrolled in Google+. It’s likely an extremely inflated number compared to the number of users that engaged with Google+ social features.
Citation: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/google-doubles-plus-...
It's probably a better example of a service that never got off the ground.
Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their current cash positions alone.
One of the challenges of a social network, especially in a declining phase, is that there is far less commercial value being generated at the same time that various sorts of costs, including attacks on the network in both technical and social/economic senses increase. High-value members abandon the network, and those who remain are either stuck (say, because of institutional circumstances elsewhere), or are actively seeking to exploit other members.
This means that Trust & Safety costs are constantly increasing at the same time that recruiting talent to serve that role becomes increasingly difficult.
What the true cost curve looks like isn't clear, but basing your statement on a constant cost based on present experience is ... probably flawed.
This is especially true at Facebook's scale.
It was the best social network that existed, and before it shut down it had so gotten so much right that I think no others have matched anywhere near the complete feature sets.
Having the biggest social network sucking up personal data to feed the ad network is the reality we are in. Having Google with a larger collection of personal data linking everything to a large social network would have made things worse. Google+ forced real names which made facebook force real names. Google appstore and preinstalled apps you cannot remove force location data. Google obtaining your social graph leads down a dark path.
Still, technically, Google+ was far ahead of their competition.
Despite (and in contrast to) the absolute massive marketing effort that Google put into Google+ right from launch, it never achieved mainstream success as anything other than an OAuth login tool. That doesn't mean nobody used it, but it was always niche.
It's not a proper comparison for Twitter or Facebook, which grew organically and are both mainstream successes as social networks.
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_...>
Where did they move?
They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.
That said, Google's stated communications regarding Google+ had and have been questionable from the start. I'd had my own part in this in addressing the true size of the active community on the site, which was far below the 3--4 billion listed profiles and many hundreds of millions of active users touted. In practice, probably closer to 4--6 million true frequently actives within 30 days or so (itself not unsubstantial), and perhaps 100 million who'd been active at some point.
<https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq>
But I'd take that stated reason with a large dose of salt.
