Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.

Nope. Google+ was a ghost town. They made the right call to shut it down and focus their efforts on YouTube.

The videos and comments on YT are superb training data, every bit as good as Google+ was.

In 2025, YouTube’s total revenue (advertising + subscriptions like YouTube Premium and TV) surpassed $60 billion. If they spun out YT it would have a market cap $500-600bn putting it in the top 20 companies. Google+ would never have been worth much as the 7th most popular social network.

	▲	pks016 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ghost town was the best part, for users like me. I didn't want another fb or insta. The circles and community were great.
	▲	freehorse 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> comments on YT are superb training data This I find hard to believe. Most YT comments are just noise. Even the UX of writing comments in YT is just terrible. Comments randomly appear and disappear, and you are never sure if it is some yt algorithm, a technical issue or specific moderation practice. I am pretty sure if they valued yt comments as data, they would have put a bit more effort into that side of their platform.
	▲	shwaj 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The videos are good training data, but the comments? The comment UX is so non-conducive to discussion, and the general quality is very low compared to what used to be on Google+ (to be fair, the self-selected users of Google+ were not representative of the general population).