Don’t forget that they ran logins and notifications for everything through the Google+ interface and did things to juice the numbers like uncontrollable push notifications every time someone you’d ever exchanged email with joined (hi random person who bought a bookcase on Craigslist!).
The G+ numbers looked suspicious if you ran any sort of public website, where e.g. I saw metrics for referrals or shares at least an order of magnitude lower than Facebook or Twitter.
The Wikipedia article goes on to talk about G+'s very low engagement. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's engagement rates were somewhere near Facebook's.
> User engagement on Google+ was low compared with its competitors; ComScore estimated that users averaged just 3.3 minutes on the site in January 2012, versus 7.5 hours for Facebook.[22][23]
Indeed, and high DAUs doesn't translate to a high number of engaged users either. Just a 301 HTTP redirect through a domain as part of a chain can count as DAU and mean nothing.
yeah i visited g+ primarily for the active dev communities oriented around google products. def just once or twice a week and the activity on those "circles" was pretty slow
Slow growth/lack of user traction was what caused Google to pull the plug. Its a similar overarching problem to Twitter, but more of users being disinterested than actively repulsed due to the content the most popular users of said service post...
> Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds