OK, even I'm concerned now that Google+ may actually be dying.
Look at this plot. It's my follower count. I usually don't care how many followers I have -- after all, it's not like I make any money off my social media posts -- but I do pay attention to it as a performance metric (for G+) of sorts. And what I see in this graph concerns me greatly.
Look at the period between the left edge of the chart and July 2016. You'll notice that it's ever-so-slightly bending upward. That shape is what mathematicians call "convex" and it means that my follower count is accelerating.
Accelerating numbers is what you expect to see in healthy social networks. The reason is because as the size of the network grows, it can attract even more people, thereby adding new users even faster than it used to. That should happen until (as Facebook has recently experienced) you start to run out of new users to add. It's safe to say that Google+ is in no danger of market saturation.
Now, compare that left half of the graph with the right half, between July 2016 and now. Over the past year, instead of curving up (convex), it's curving down...a "concave" shape. Concave is bad for social networks because it means that the rate of new users coming on-board is slowing down. That suggests that G+ users aren't attracting their friends as quickly as they used to. And THAT means users aren't committed to the platform, suggesting it's only a matter of time before the network ceases to grow entirely. And that would surely mean the end of G+ as we know it.
But then, maybe G+ as we knew it already ended a while ago. The shift from connecting people to other people (what social networks typically do) to connecting people to content (what Google wants G+ to do) happened in May, 2015, and we saw convex growth after that. But, the shift from a browser-centric G+ to an app-centric G+ peaked in mid-2016 (https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/everything-in-its-right-place.html), right around when the growth shifted from convex to concave. Is that the cause? I don't know. What I do know is that the dramatic life of G+ hasn't been one of unqualified support from Google leadership.
So what is Google going to do to recover its growth and attract new users? Or, perhaps more importantly, what is Google going to do to get old G+ users to come back? Maybe it's the same answer to both questions...maybe not. All I can say for sure is that G+ doesn't have much longer if these growth trends don't turn around pretty soon.
And yes, I realize I'm generalizing from just one person's profile. While my data could be dramatically different from G+ as a whole, I don't think it is. Sure, the scale is radically different, but the trend feels pretty much in-line with what I (and others) have been experiencing for a while. And I'm concerned. Are you?
My not-statistically-valid impression is the same as yours. I'm gauging by how many new people follow me each week, and how many comments I get, and both are slowing.
ReplyDeleteWhich totally sucks, since I love the place.
No, you're not delusional and your results are not unique to you.
ReplyDeleteI've noticed an odd trend in my own contacts here. It seems that people I follow are circling the wagons. So many people I have followed for years are adding contacts in common. Not unusual anymore to be commenting on a thread and surprisingly, people I know from far different Communities and interests are commenting too. It is very obvious that more than just a few people I know are adding contacts within circles I have traveled for years.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I made myself clear here. An example would be someone I knew from a large Sci-fi circle who is suddenly posting with someone whose interest is primarily maps or rocks or crochet, even. And people I most stay in touch with are reaching out to add contacts from trusted friends. I've not seen this happening in previous years to the extent it is now and very obvious. Anyone else noticing this?
Thanks for post, Craig.
They have been cleaning up some dead or empty accounts lately, that could explain part of it.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, some have left.
I know people who came back because it is still the least horrible.
Many communities facing the same problem.
Meanwhile, bots are invading.
I am still here; even though I didn't win............ ;=)
ReplyDeleteSid J yeah. Like South East Asian looking girls wanting to convert me to Islam.
ReplyDeleteHappens. :)
Bigscrod wants cake you've said this well: I am being added by people who've been here a long time. I mostly add people who have been here a long time. Very few newbies.
ReplyDeleteI only recently started posting public (as opposed to circles), but it does seem like numbers have plateaued.
ReplyDeleteI don't have any specific data to offer, but some observations.
ReplyDeleteCircleCount had posted some metrics earlier this year, by which I judged that the ~January 2017 committment to the new site design actually had very little impact. It created a notch in a prominent downward trajectory, but didn't impact the overall trend line. I called the rollout as a non-event on that basis.
There used to be an independent site that tracked total G+ profiles, but that has gone dark. If you feel like downloading sitemap files, you can do that, though this is a lot of data (~25 GB when I did it in early 2015).
http://plus.miernicki.com
The method I've used, which remains fairly useful, and can be tuned to areas of specific interest, is to search for terms of particular interest to you. If you happen to choose a set that is also timely, you can get a sense of how discussion is evolving online generally.
That's the idea in my "Tracking the Conversation" analysis, which uses the FP Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a general proxy for "intelligent discussion". Note that in my first iteration I'd simply tried individual names of interest -- "Thomas Picketty" was among the first.
reddit.com - Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web • r/dredmorbius
The key is that you can use Google Search, and see where the hits are. If you run desktop search, and limit results to a specific site, you'll get a count of hits on that site. (It's not an absolutely perfect measure, but it's pretty good.)
The problem is that you've got to come up with a list of sites to explore, and ... that is kind of a PITA. I'm working on ways to try to work with that, though the Alexa Top 1,000 sites or something similar might be useful.
And you can dive in on the top results to see if there's any actual discussion going on there. That was how I found that for my interests, on G+, there really wasn't that much discussion, and I was already frequently a significant part of it. Also that Communities were absolutely dead.
Generally, this is a good way to avoid the distortions that relying on your own individual experience might impose.
I recently returned to G+ to see how it is doing, and find the engagement levels way down from a couple of years ago. When people post something and get no reaction to it, they stop posting. A few stars still get good engagement, but the rest of us no longer do.
ReplyDeleteWataru Tenga There is the issue of critical mass.
ReplyDeleteBy design, plussing a post doesn't update you when anyone comments, so if you have nothing to immediately say, it's easy to start a trend where everyone else plusses and moves on.
This is, in general, a bad design, but it can be overcome by sheer numbers. With enough followers, the odds are that one will comment intelligently early on, spawning a conversation thread.
Fundamentally, I don't believe that G+ is designed to support the sort of usage patterns that are important to me.
I only have a few thousand followers, but my count has flatlined. And flatlining is synonymous with death, so...
ReplyDeleteMy gut is I've seen a decrease in the number of people following my account. On the other hand, several of my collections have been doing quite well (US Politics, Gender & Sexuality (although not as much recently), and a few others).
ReplyDeleteKee Hinckley That is because you won..............;=)
ReplyDeleteKee Hinckley Puppies and Otters.
ReplyDeleteOr do those fall under US Politics, or Gender & Sexuality?
I have noticed this too. Not that my number of followers have gone down but that the activity on Google+ has stagnated. Google+ has become more specialised rather than generalised, and it does feel like Google doesn't really care about Google+. In comparison to other sites these days, Google+ just feels overly complicated. I have actually considered closing down my Google+ account several times and I still haven't found enough reasons not to.
ReplyDeleteThe other question that springs up every time this discussion turns up: If not G+, then where?
ReplyDeleteI post regularly on Reddit, and created a "personal subreddit" (a somewhat problematic characterisation, but ...) to do so. I've given the plusses and minuses a few times, they're in the subreddit FAQ. I have ~850 followers there, vs. 2,500 on G+. Interactions tend to be stronger here.
Reddit isn't based around long and ongoing communications, though they occasionally break out. If you hunt for them, there are some good subreddits. I think the site is hitting (social) scaling limits though.
I'm highly allergic to Facebook, and not much inclined to Twitter, though I can see some possible benefits.
I've been using Ello for going on 3 years, though that seems to be fading out -- the site clearly doesn't want to be Yet Another Discussion Site, and is pursuing that goal with vigour.
For all that I found the Imzy experience execerable, I actually liked a few things about the site (best Markdown implementation hands down), and wish there were ways to bring that forward. Oh well.
There are blogs, and I could see a revival of interest in them. I have qualms with most of the major blogging sites based on IMO dated technology.
Authorea, an academic collaboration site, actually strikes me as having an interesting feature set. It is, however, allergic to anonymity. Sigh.
I've a few other ideas in mind, including various self-hosting or P2P type concepts, though I'm not convinced those will scale. Mastodon is fun. IPFS (the Internet Protocol Filesystem) has some interesting ideas. I'm kicking around some related ones.
A big problem/question I've got is just how many Really Interesting People there are anyway, and how many of them you'd want in the same room. I have suspicions it's probably a few million tops (~1% of global population). There's some historical basis for believing this, including such statistics as the size of print runs of historically significant books. E.g., Darwin's Origin of Species saw a first edition print run of 1,250 volumes in 1859. The population of the UK was just shy 30 millions, so, one copy per 24,000 population.
Even accounting for literacy rates (~50%) and multiple readers per copy, that's a very modest exposure.
Lessons from other early networks -- The WELL, Usenet, Slashdot, etc., suggest a smaller rather than larger core group. If G+ actively selects for that, its size actually isn't too great a handicap. Unfortunately, research I've done (see above) suggests that this isn't the case, in which case scale effects dominate.
en.m.wikipedia.org - Authorea - Wikipedia
What's the curve look like for your collections Craig Froehle?
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius One of my concerns is the issue of how many interesting people you can sustain in a single conversation. I suspect it's not that high a number.
ReplyDeleteMore on Origin:
ReplyDeleteAltogether, before the copyright expired in 1901, the publishers had printed 56,000 copies in the original format and another 48,000 in the cheap edition. This was not bad for a big fat volume that (apart from one diagram) failed the Alice in Wonderland test for a useful book: it had no pictures or conversations.
So, 104,000 copies, 46m population or 0.2% penetration.
theguardian.com - On the Origin of Species: The book that changed the world | Science | The Guardian
Steve S ""Conversation doesn't scale very well." Dave Weinberger.
ReplyDeleteI suspect about 10-15 active participants. A group size of maybe 30-40 with lurkers. Much above that it tends to slide downhill.
The somewhat perverse thing I've noticed is that even with a less than ideal selection, so long as you've got good guidelines and some modest enforcement, the discussions in such a small group can be pretty impressively good.
The challenge then generally becomes not going into groupthink, mutual-admiration societies, and/or small-scale fueds and boiling off of folks. So a solid wall isn't the best of designs either.
If I could figure out how to build a system based around groups of about that size, with some fluidity of movement, and, most importantly: selecting the best discussion upwards, well, that might be interesting.
It's strongly opposed to a bunch of other interests and goals, particularly of advertising and top-down message imperatives.
Edward Morbius What I'm seeing on G+ (and this might be partially because I'm an intentionally polarizing person) is a lot of permanent partitioning due to blocks. This is only increasing the problem of a lack of critical mass.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that G+ was never really designed for what I wanted, but happened to sometimes work ok despite itself. As it was "fixed" to more closely track its goals, it moved further away from what actually works for me.
Simple thing: Even the most primitive BBS software from my 300 baud modem days made it easy to read new responses to your own posts, to ensure that you didn't accidentally drop the ball. G+, however, is not much good at this. It makes it really hard, even with the Notifications tab. And recent changes have only made it worse.
For example, I have the habit of clicking on text and marking it as I read it. It's sort of the equivalent of moving your finger along the line, a way to compensate for the limitations of screens. Now, if I do this, it unexpands the post. Worse, sometimes clicking on the text (even if there's no expansion involved) moves me to the top of the screen, losing my position vertically.
Seriously, these are solved problems. Simple modern software, like vBulletin, does a better job at this, even if it's not built to scale to the size of social platforms. There's no reason G+ has to be the way it is.
Edward Morbius You don't have to convince me G+ is suboptimally designed, specified, and implemented.
ReplyDeleteThat said, what did you want?
Edit: Um. I mean Steve S.
Oh yes, I'm concerned!
ReplyDeleteAnd it's a long time I am. Since they released Google Photos in fact. A brutal dismantlement without any remplacement feature... after almost two years left abandoned... what social network can survive that.
I am currently writing an article called "Rise and fall of Google+".
My conclusion is simple: G+ is not (and never was) a social network, it is just another publishing platform. Profile page and Collections are just blogs, and communities just forums. Nothing new under the sun.
Edward Morbius I think you meant to reply to me, not yourself, but that sort of makes my point.
ReplyDeleteLook, all I want is the ability to have interesting discussions. This requires a critical mass, helpful tools, and adequate moderation. G+ lacks all three.
Even if growth stops, I'm not sure that anything would happen to the platform, at least not in the short run. Google obviously isn't going anywhere, and I honestly can't see them just abandoning their answer to Facebook, even if it's user base remains more or less stagnant. It would probably end up as one of their projects that they leave on the shelf until someone comes up with an idea to revamp it, in which case they would simply sweep the existing user base over as the starting base for their new gimmick.
ReplyDeleteBrad D Remember Reader?
ReplyDeleteRemember Buzz?
ReplyDelete#MakeGooglePlusGreatAgain is my vain pray
François Bacconnet Remember Wave?
ReplyDeleteSteve S You mean I'm not you?
ReplyDeleteIt's so hard keeping my identity straight.
Also, see the Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User:
ReplyDeletereddit.com - The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User • r/dredmorbius
Which, apparently Hannah Arendt totally stole from me:
Hanna Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.celinecondorelli.eu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_v2.pdf
Steve S sure I do!
ReplyDeletehttps://lh3.googleusercontent.com/OY4jflkPZVMCoKNyKdSTIyN7Y-ulto8qLZlMaltWjPGUFXYqnGNMKku9uCwFzQvABguaYzZ-sJtVQLdQ-7c4cQ_-PuKi781znSKc=s0
Backing up CircleCount, here is my largest collection. The red line is my profile followers. The increase is hardly noticeable in comparison to the collection followers. Now I will be the first to admit that it is probably skewed by being a featured collection, but I would really love to find out what other people's experiences are with profile vs collection followers.
ReplyDeletecirclecount.com - The follower growth of the collection Green Technology vs. the follower growth of Alan Stainer
Alan Stainer This is one of those situations where a log-scale (or semi-log) plot would be useful. Small absolute, though large relative, shifts don't show up at all on a linear plot. They do on a semi-log plot.
ReplyDeleteThat said: point taken.
I'm wondering if the graph started decelerating from when the US election started really ramping up? G+ started getting boring since then, or at least samey... Especially for us non-amercans
ReplyDeleteAlan Stainer And, looking at the Green Tech collection, with north of 172k followers, you're generating ... ~30 - 350 or so +1 actions per post. The Plus doesn't give us view counts (and I think even took away the image-view-count proxy), so I'm not sure what additional metrics we're seeing, but that's an 0.017% to 0.2% engagement.
ReplyDeleteLooking at Reddit -- one of the more active engagement sites -- /r/news has 14.6 million subscribers, and looking now at above-the-fold items, has a peak of 44.6k votes. That's actually about 0.11% as well, if it makes you feel any better.
I've seen some stats with "views per follower" or similar metrics elsewhere, let me see if I can't dig that up.
I use G+ because I got an early invitation. It's the only social media I use. If it craters, I'll go off social media completely.
ReplyDeleteI'll miss you all.
The commonality of most exponential trends is that they are unsustainable.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius precisely. The numbers by themselves don't tell the whole story. To use an analogy, a restaurant may have hundreds of visitors (or 'followers') every day, but only one or two of those visitors will post a review in any given month (probably longer). If the restaurant is tracking reviews as a metric it doesn't mean they aren't a successful restaurant, it just means they need better metrics.
ReplyDeleteHere's an explanation of the VPF metric. Mind that for a full picture you'd want to know the number of posts as well -- a high VPF might indicate either a large level of engagement, or a massive post count.
ReplyDeleteGoogle has since hidden the "Views" statistic, which is a real pity, as it was a wonderful proxy for net site engagement.
globerunner.com - Introducing a New Google Plus Quality Metric: Views Per Follower VPF | Globe Runner
VPF would be useful if we could factor in collections. At the moment there is no way of knowing how many unique followers a profile has in total, or how much crossover there is between collections.
ReplyDeleteAlan Stainer Google's user-oriented stats-and-metrics blindness is ... curious.
ReplyDeleteAnother example, something of a sore point with me presently: there is absolutely no way to even get a count of the tabs I have open in Chrome/Android.
I know that it takes approximately seven minutes to scroll from one end of the list to the other, though. In all seriousness.
Why worry? The solution is simple.
ReplyDeleteci6.googleusercontent.com
I've said this before and candidly I think it's pretty much the truth: Google has abandoned G+ and was just hoping for the day when it dies on its own so it doesn't have to pull the plug and catch hell from the users.
ReplyDeleteWhen is the last time you saw a post here from the person who's in charge of Google+? Hell, for that matter who is in charge of Google+??? I couldn't tell you.
Yes, google+ isn't going to challenge Facebook as the next big social network but it could be a solid social network for everyone, especially those of us who refuse to do business with Facebook.
I'm sure Google is getting tons of valuable signals out of Google+ but like I said, I think they're just hoping for the day when it dies on its own.
If they invested some TLC, support and Innovation things could grow and maintain for them.
I think there was intense engagement during the US election cycle and that politics pulled in New, and some potential fake, users who otherwise wouldn't have found Google+ of interest. As this user's pull away and the flurry of political activism starts to die off as a daily habit, I think we will see some normalization of these numbers again.
ReplyDeleteYes, of course Google+ is dying. There's no money here. Without a profit, and no obvious way to make one, this infrastructure isn't going to get an investment. Lack of incentive plus low feedback loops signal the end to any community project.
I'll probably be on here when they kill it. I really enjoy this platform and don't want to see it die. I have, however, seen many other social networks die and the pattern you've outlined is 100% accurate. Without something new to pull people in, without the connection to other Google services, this is just a message board.
Google+ is not just about the Google+ that the public use. It is part of G Suite now with a really strong business case for using internally at different organisations. It is (in my opinion) a much better proposition for companies wanting to use social media internally than Facebook's offering. For starters it comes with a boat load of productivity apps, whereas Facebook does not and there are an awful lot of companies already using G Suite.
ReplyDeleteSo I don't think G+ is dying. Not yet at any rate.
John Lewis A realisation for me is that much of Google's activities seem to make sense if you consider them from the point of view of "how do you train your (AI) dragon?"
ReplyDeleteG+, human interactions, text, hell, even the pointless bickering and trolling, are probably useful in some regards. To what end, I have some concerns.
The other side of this, though, is that when Google determines its dragon has been sufficiently fed, or gathered all it can, it drops interest like a hot potato. Google-411 is one particularly flagrant case in point (though "OK Google" largely replaces it). I'm sure there are other instances which occur.
And of course, G+ was in many ways a response to (and possibly a goad of) Facebook. Possibly even a way to make FB think that social was a place worth investing in and fighting to keep management over (though I find my own suggestion of this as merely a feint not particularly credible).
reddit.com - How to Train your Dragon • r/dredmorbius
Mac Baird You could be on to something. Combine that with the Hannah Arendt from Edward Morbius for street cred though. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced that social networks are a good idea.
ReplyDeleteSocial networking used to be snail mail.
ReplyDeleteSent from my iPhone
Edward Morbius Yes, I think the attempt was to link Google into one massive thing, then someone decided Google was better off as Alphabet and that dream died. The giant thing that is Google is instead a species of things. The monolith idea died and no one wanted the skeleton it was going to hang from anymore.
ReplyDeleteAlan Stainer Mostly agree with what you said about G+ being part of a Google Suite.
ReplyDeleteBut are you saying they are using it internally?
In the beginning, engineers that proudly worked on G+ were present.
Some left a dead account, many just closed it.
We have more chances on finding them on Twitter or FB today.
So I wonder if they really use it, and if so, how?
Alan Stainer Collections took off initially, but subscriber growth has tailed off from the early days. But that's not my main metric with those. It used to be good conversation, but as I've been forced to limit comments to extended circles (due to the rampant comment spam), even that's taken a hit as my extended circles haven't grown as quickly as people have left.
ReplyDeleteEric Mintz We'd miss you. And good god, man, get an avatar already!!!
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle the question is, what? I have a face made for radio, and to compensate, a voice made for silent movies.
ReplyDeleteEric Mintz You and I both, brother. :-) Why do you think I prefer text-based media? :-D
ReplyDeleteHere...here's a lightning bolt. Not great, but better than a blue head for sure.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/WDHiAMeJESAatJHygT891nzeLvIqpP6XDlvXHnqd33x9dUvHizPreNClku0OQ69sOPeGWmXviATZpDRdrdTdYpx1aYTvpCP3Q6sJ=s0
Eric Mintz Or better yet (the world needs more puns)...
ReplyDeletehttps://lh3.googleusercontent.com/rP4EC2CeCuJxpc1ixQ7S2nPabmwh3NZMXMbIIwUAsclkJhEB0z4G9lYhlMQqCJzkXykk9KN7QdirZih2YkgES52-xO_uRHgDs0AM=s0
It's ironic that practically the only discussions getting traction here lately are the ones about the (worrisome) state of Google+. I guess this means we really want it to succeed. If the people I follow on Twitter were here, I would prefer to be here also. But most of them are not.
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle Well?
ReplyDeleteMaybe get a sense of humor?
When you are addressed in a thread by name or deed; respond.
You just lost another one.
Eric Mintz I vote for the mints pic, give it a try. :)
ReplyDeleteI honestly have no idea what you're talking about, Jeff. But now that you've blocked me (for whatever reason), I can't even ask you to explain my apparent insult.
ReplyDeletehttps://lh3.googleusercontent.com/2LrNPBwLus9LstT2B-CQO_ZZ5edOhQPJqCwRqskyn-4PZFYGBtMQx4ByCmRwflyS78UYzY3y1yOcLmVYrI7AoO3kDI3z8wRiiUnq=s0
Eric Mintz An avatar need not be your own face.
ReplyDeleteWataru Tenga When a site's really in trouble, not even those take off.
ReplyDeleteThat was the final clue on Ello.
Craig Froehle Limiting comments to extended circles is probably a limiting factor. I'm certainly less inclined to follow someone if I can't comment on their posts.
ReplyDeleteI have been looking more and more towards Diaspora, but I am not sure it will give me what I am missing. Also, the fact that it is still in beta puts me off a bit.
ReplyDeleteKee Hinckley Possibly. For years, I chastised people who limited who could comment on their posts. Then, the comment spam and junk just got overwhelming. I was literally spending more time clearing out crap comments from my posts than I was actually reading and posting. And that's just not gonna work. But as to its effect on what I'm observing, I don't think that's it...others who have not limited commenters have also observed the same concave growth.
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle I've oddly had very good luck with comments. But I probably don't have nearly you're followers.
ReplyDeleteKee Hinckley *your.
ReplyDeleteHe has some weird followers, including some grammar nazis...
Kee Hinckley It's mostly a problem on posts in my more-popular collections -- my Tech collection has nearly 400,000 followers and, as a result, attracts lots and lots of spam, bots & semi-literates.
ReplyDeleteChristian Nalletamby :) I'm going to blame autocorrect :)
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle I'm rather amazed that they do such a poor job of filtering out spammers and dummy account ts. I co-manage a community and we get 20-50 nonsense followers eery day, and only 1 out of 100 is even conceivably a real follower. The vast majority aren't even English speakers, and it's a US News discussion site. Many are obviously commercial.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a script to reject anyone with less than 5 posts and that nukes 75% of them.
Kee Hinckley Huh? You can do that?
ReplyDeleteDon't mind if I PM you? Could find a use for that.
Thanks!
Kee Hinckley What is this script of which you speak?
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius Ssssh! ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ
ReplyDeleteIt's Moscow code, KBG, MGB and Breitbart only!
Edward Morbius It is unfortunately an AppleScript. If you're using a Mac though, I can share it. It looks at the list of people asking to join a community and either runs in automatic mode (reject anyone with less than N posts) or manual mode, as above, but show you their home page and ask whether you want to accept, reject, or defer until later. It's not pretty, but it helps for that specific case.
ReplyDeleteBenjamin Cobb Facebook is similar.
ReplyDeleteI tried Minds, it's worse.
It's mostly about selecting the communities and people you want to read from, and your homepage becomes interesting. :)