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

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.