Technical features don't make your network. Technical failures can break them.

Community is what matters, and founding cohort is hugely significant. Group personality is established early, and can often veer off in unexpected (and frequently unwanted) directions. I've just mentioned my recent Imzy experiences, an interesting concept in several ways, but with some exceptionally poor dynamics interacting with a quite volatile userbase (at least in part).

Google's Circles were a fuckup from the start, and that was apparent from the first "you're holding it wrong" arguments and flamewars coming both from those following people and those castigating their followers. Distribution, topic, notification, and source are all different concepts, Google+ tried squishing them into a single conceptual model. That model didn't fit reality. And it wasn't reality that broke as a consequence. I think it's Larry Wall who's observed that you cannot simplify a complex state simply by ignoring its complexity. That complxity will out, and it's going to be ugly.

You're probably right about the vast majority of G+ users not caring about blocking and nymwars, because the vast majority of users never publicly posted to the site. Only about 6% of users have every written a public post, something I and Stone Temple Consulting independently verified by sampling actual profiles (I ran 50k, STC 500k, see STC's "Hard Numbers" blog post for a solid breakdown).

On the other hand, if you did use G+ heavily, blocking matters a hell of a lot, because otherwise you've got a bunch of annoying fucks in your face, and Nymwars was critical to the participation of many, quite a few of whom are what made G+ interesting, to the small extent that it actually is. Not offering those features may not have direct effects, but it does have indirect effects, often profound.

In the Imzy instance, the lack of blocking (which I wanted to use), and the presence of pervasive anonymous posting (which interests me little -- a few nyms are largely sufficient, though I might occasionally use a throwaway) had a tremendous impact on the tenor of discussion. Such that I quite simply feel it would be a major risk to me to continue to use the site. Something I quite rarely feel. I certainly won't be inviting others there. This despite some nice technical features.

I agree, actually, that most conversation is small-scale. We're effectively creating an impromptu, softly-defined conversation space here, for a one-on-one discussion. David Weinberger, commenting on Reddit a year or so back, quipped "Conversation doesn't scale very well." For the types of discussions I'm most interested in, a group of 6 to 60 seems pretty good, maybe a few more than that in a good crowd with solid direction from the top. My Imzy experience is contrasted directly with dang's moderation here on HN -- one of those "antisocial techie spaces", which frankly achieves vastly better results than the "kinder, gentler Reddit" Imzy claims it wants to be.

Where I'll disagree with you strongly is that the people who focus on edge cases are invisible. They may not be apparent, but their presence or absence is quite tangible.

G+ offered the promise of being Usenet 3.0, and had (and still has) a number of first-generation Usnetters, several of whom I follow. Peter da Silva (who created Usenet 2.0), Karl Aurbach (one of the very first Arpanet team), Lauren Weinstein, and others. But quite a few people I'd really hoped would participate, and followed with anticipation, opted out. Pretty much the whole Boing Boing crew, notably Cory Doctorow, though Xeni Jardin posted for a while. Jonathan Zittrain. Lawrence Lessig, who posted for a bit then left. Etc.

Ello saw a similar initial groundrush with Quinn Norton, Merideth L. Patterson, Clay Shirky, and Paul Mason (the journalist) active early. Even jwz showed up -- to tell us that we'd all discover the importance of the social graph soon enough. There's a small little group there, and I enjoy the interactions, which are also refreshingly healthy. But it's not what I'd hoped for. Great place for art and poetry, and there are some local heros -- Ksenia Anske, if you like Russian-American authors, and Trenton Lee Tiemeyer, a gifted poet. I really like their content.

But critical mass on diverse topics, not.

I've looked into where that does happen, and the answers, in general:

* Wordpress. Far and away the winner. Long-form, complex content favours blogs. Whodathunkit. The problems though are engagement and discovery, issues that SocMed platforms address.

* Reddit. Large and very high s/n, by my measure. Not quite the quality of blogs in terms of posts (though that can happen), but a far richer conversation.

* Metafilter. Tiny by Internet standards, but an astounding s/n.

* Facebook. Sheer mass has its advantages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

HN also does well, though within a somewhat limited scope. The reasons have little to do with the technical capabilities, and may have a great deal to do with lacking features. The resulting conversational level is high though.