G+ had a nerdier audience and many interesting communities and posts. I don't get this ghost town line. For example HN is a niche site, with almost no audience, with almost all accounts dead. Right?
HN has niche appeal, a strongly focused discussion (there's one story feed, and effectively about 30-40 stories that really register on the front page, though many more are submitted), and pretty dedicated professional moderators. As of 2015:
Roughly 2.6M views a day, 300K daily uniques, 3 to 3.5M monthly uniques. It depends on how you count, of course.
Which ... actually probably compares favourably with Google+, which had a core of about 50-100k highly active users (posting 50-100x monthly), and maybe an extended set of as much as 100 million who'd interacted with the site at one time or another significantly.
I've done a fair bit of measurement (limited by available resources and indicators), and one conclusion I'm coming to is that raw numbers do a pathetic job of indicating media or forum vitality. Most especially raw census numbers.
Looking at G+ communities, and running grid plots of engagements, it turned out that posts drove other engagement, not members, and in fact it seems as if there's some kind of fall-off (at least on a per-member basis) when a given forum gets above about 5,000 members (though I need to check this).
Google had more users. But they were spread out over a vastly larger set of forums and discussion, there was no central "square" (as with HN's "new" or "news" pages), moderation was exceedingly uneven, and often entirely absent, and there were (and remain) huge barriers for like minds to come together.
HN's overall focus is fairly (but not excessively) narrow, and much of the conversation takes itself too seriously (and certainly myself), but relative to the rest of the Net it's an exemplar. Good conversation remains exceedingly hard to find.
> it turned out that posts drove other engagement, not members
Yes, this was something particular to G+. Incidentally see these in Linus interview [0], HN post [1]
" The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control"
"I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere)"
