I remember Google forcing a Google + down the throats of everyone who had a Google-related account such as a YouTube account. Then they started boasting about the record growth of their social media platform. I immediately knew that this was only a tactic to please their investors.

Years later they finally caught on with what as going on when someone published the usage data revealing that most of the traffic on Google+ didn't spend more than 5 seconds on the site. This meant that most of their "usage" was people who accidentally clicked on the wrong link or immediately left the moment they saw whatever they were interested in was on Google+

Reddit is doing the same thing by not deleting bot accounts to make it sound like the activity on the site is much greater than it actually is.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Which is sad because the whole circles concept was actually nice.

[–] Blyfh@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I was very young when I last used Google+ and remember very little. What exactly differentiates circles from subreddits as a concept?

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 4 points 5 months ago

Oh it’s completely different. Reddit is phpBB v2. A forum/bulletin board.

Circles is closer to kbin. You could create ad-hoc circles for your friends which worked like labels. So you could post to that circle of friends without making it public to your circle of coworkers, for instance. You could also have communities which were essentially forums/public circles. And there was the microblogging aspect too.