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What's G+ like these days? Used it a few years ago, only social net I gave a serious try, and was really quite fond of it. Circles were quite a practical way o

What's G+ like these days? Used it a few years ago, only social net I gave a serious try, and was really quite fond of it. Circles were quite a practical way of following topics of interest, w/o having to actually communicate with anyone or disclose anything about myself to anyone (as opposed to "friending" anyone on fb, which notifies the other party as if I actually wanted any interaction with them), and there was quite a lot of say tech folks in various topics to track. But as a topical news aggregator, there are other options, such as hackernews, reddit, various planets and desktop/console rss/atom aggregators etc, so not a real gain. Didn't stick to it mainly cuz I'm apparently too introverted for classic friend-to-friend social networking, as I suspected; didn't really have anything to say about anything, and didn't care much to hear about the daily fluff in the lives of acquaintances either. So what kinds of concepts/services developed and thrived on G+ since google gave up on yt integration?

drusepth 10y ago
It's evolved a bit more mainstream-feeling, which isn't necessarily a bad thing inherently, but did away with a lot of the cool quirks that I enjoyed originally (for example, there's a couple extra clicks to actually add people to individual circles now -- whenever you click the button to add them to your circles it instead adds them to an auto-generated "Following" circle, and you have to go back in and remove/add the circles you actually want). Much of the focus on circles was replaced with Collections (which are basically reverse-circles), which I think works a little better. You can still follow people as a whole, but you can also choose to follow any of their "collections", which basically split their posts up per-topic (e.g. I have collections in writing, programming, and pictures of my cats -- most people don't follow all three). Also with more people joining G+, it moved further away from how I was using it as a news aggregate to more of an actual social network. I could probably get more news if I unfollowed people posting about their days, but most of the people I follow are experts in my fields and it's interesting to see what their days/problems/lives are like. There's still lots of really good, in-depth conversations in comments though, as long as you write a reasonable post to prompt them (most shares without accompanying text are just ignored). Also, I've heard the Communities feature is huge, but it seems a bit too social (and lowest-denominator) for my tastes. If I were looking for an analogy around the net for the parts of G+, I'd probably say Communities feel like YouTube comments, public posts feel like the better end of reddit, and private posts (where much of the fun in the author/publishing circles I'm in happens) feel like HN.

drusepth 10y ago

It's evolved a bit more mainstream-feeling, which isn't necessarily a bad thing inherently, but did away with a lot of the cool quirks that I enjoyed originally (for example, there's a couple extra clicks to actually add people to individual circles now -- whenever you click the button to add them to your circles it instead adds them to an auto-generated "Following" circle, and you have to go back in and remove/add the circles you actually want). Much of the focus on circles was replaced with Collections (which are basically reverse-circles), which I think works a little better. You can still follow people as a whole, but you can also choose to follow any of their "collections", which basically split their posts up per-topic (e.g. I have collections in writing, programming, and pictures of my cats -- most people don't follow all three). Also with more people joining G+, it moved further away from how I was using it as a news aggregate to more of an actual social network. I could probably get more news if I unfollowed people posting about their days, but most of the people I follow are experts in my fields and it's interesting to see what their days/problems/lives are like. There's still lots of really good, in-depth conversations in comments though, as long as you write a reasonable post to prompt them (most shares without accompanying text are just ignored). Also, I've heard the Communities feature is huge, but it seems a bit too social (and lowest-denominator) for my tastes. If I were looking for an analogy around the net for the parts of G+, I'd probably say Communities feel like YouTube comments, public posts feel like the better end of reddit, and private posts (where much of the fun in the author/publishing circles I'm in happens) feel like HN.