Google+ only had that many users because many other Google properties (YouTube being the biggest) were lumped in together. I bet the majority of Google+ "users" weren't even aware that the platform existed.
Right, it would grab you by YT and wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Effectively it was also world's largest deanonymization effort. Must have been some hefty internal incentives program at Google, they tried as if their bonus depended on it.
Yeah. If you had a google account was more or less impossible not to be on Google+.
The thing is that engagement was pathetically low. We used to joke that the best password manager would be to post all your secrets in a google+ posting, because nobody would ever see your post.
But that right there is why as a fairly strict free market type, I see the need for government intervention in some tech antitrust situations.
If Google+ failed with google immediately signing anyone with a gmail account up for it and pushing it fairly hard with all their channels - how extremely unlikely is it for someone to organically take Facebook’s market share away?
Oh no problem, you’ll only need someone with more resources than Google!
Maybe not mainly YT: Google forced people to create one account there even for rating Android apps, so I suppose a lot of random Android users were counted too.