Ask HN: Where are all the devs on Google Plus?

16 pointsemperorcezar9y ago17 comments

I keep reading that Google plus is used by devs. Every time I jump on there it's a ghost town. Am I just looking in the wrong places?

17 comments

15 comments · 11 top-level

ocdtrekkie9y ago· 2 in thread

I've used Google+ as my primary social network for a long time, and in the last year, it's been drastically quieter. The whole "ghost town" thing used to be kinda a gag, now it's kinda for real.

Also, "all the devs" in Google+'s case, primarily means "all the Googlers" plus a variety of people who dev primarily on Google platforms and hence want to follow all those Googlers.

acchow9y ago

Who thought "Google Plus" was a good idea for a name? It even sounds ridiculous to say.

Sylos9y ago

I don't know, if there's anything to it, but I once heard that Google Plus was originally not planned to be a social network and rather was supposed to be a way for celebrities and companies and such to provide additional information about themselves, which would then get displayed in the Google Search results.

And like, for that the name would actually make somewhat sense.

1 more reply

ryanmaynard9y ago· 2 in thread

Aside from HN, perhaps you could try:

* IRC Channels

* Twitter (search by profile contents and/or hashtags)

* Mastodon? Still a bit unproven, but the atmosphere there resembles the 90s web.

ubersec9y ago

mastodon has a few. try the tech instance or sec one

ryanmaynard9y ago

I forgot to add Lobste.rs

mohanmcgeek9y ago

They updated it about a year ago, breaking all the old links. Now nobody goes there.

mcv9y ago

I'm on there, though mostly for the vibrant RPG community.

Whether it looks like a ghost town depends on how many people you are following, and which communities you're a member of. And whether you've configured those communities to actually show all of their content in your stream, which is something you have to do manually for every community you're in. So that's a pain.

Google has been trying to hard to chase people out of Google+, but people are still holding on, because there isn't really any good alternative. It's a shame to see Google undermining their own platform like this, though.

thebosz9y ago

Just a small corner for a small language, but the Dart group is pretty active and is where I get my news: https://plus.google.com/communities/114566943291919232850

Rondom9y ago

Quite a few Linux devs are on G+: Linus, Greg Kroah-Hartman, David Airlie, Lennart Pöttering, ...

nthcolumn9y ago

Yeh dev here who shunned fb et al initially - the're heaps of communities but you can't display a snippet? Hands up I created some of them but am wondering what the point was... teeny-tiny bit of markdown would make it really adequate.

relics4439y ago

I know there are devrels from the Android team that are pretty active in the communities there.

clavalle9y ago

Well, more than other populations which, these days, isn't saying much.

orev9y ago

devs need to spend time actually focusing on something, not wasting time on shallow stuff like social media. If they do, they're going to pick a social media site that has a better payoff than G+

cocomar19y ago

It IS a ghost town.

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