I am always amazed people liked g+ circles so much. I often found them rather clumsy and isolating. Maybe I just don't get what people want out of these platforms?

I was always more of a forum type and also more reader than participant. Looking at circles specifically, I often saw patterns of "Everyone tell me what you want to read about so I can put you in the right circle" which meant you had to manually subscribe and unsubscribe by private message and could often see nothing at all if you didn't want to contact that person. This is of course nice for privacy and getting to personally know people, but I found it really hindering to discussion and a having a usable archive of a community.

Of course, google+, like most modern social media, was also people-centric instead of topic centric, which always annoyed me, but many people seem to like? It still was a network where I read many cool things and had interesting discussion, but I felt like it was a watered down replacement of forums even back then.