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Comment by eliben | Hacker News Reader

I really like it that G+ is becoming a "lightweight blogging" platform. There are too many of these around, and folding them into a "social network" seems like a good idea. I wish they would add more features that would make this easier, though, since in general I think it's in everyone's interest and will pull more traffic to the site.

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A bit off topic, but is it just me or is the quality of comments on public G+ posts is absolutely terrible? Within a few hours there has been more than 100 replies. Most are inane, rude, of the useless “great post!” type, or just plain old spam. I could only manage to glean about 8 or 9 insightful replies.

Is this something intrinsic to G+? Is it a function of the author's popularity? The discussions here are normally much more sensible, but I would expect HN's readership to have a fairly similar demographic to that of Rob Pike's G+ subscribers.

That was exactly my thought--there were a few thoughtful replies in there, but otherwise just absolute mindless bullshit. It's the same way when Linus makes a post about how he's just updated the code in his preferred emacs editor, spawning 500 posts of "I use Vim!"

G+ is fair to middlin' at a bunch of stuff. Comments lack threading. There's poor noise control. Content filtering is limited to "+1" or "flag". There's no "-1" button (though various Chrome extensions have offered this at various points.

The main advantage is that it's a large community (10m+ users presently) initially seeded by Googlers (e.g.: tech-savvy people), and including a few notable luminaries such as Rob Pike. And if you've got the right circles, eventually good content finds its way into your stream. Sometimes (content discover/surfacing is something G+ does surprisingly poorly, and is an area at whch HN, Reddit, and StackExchange win hugely).

Adding a new one is not a good solution to "there are too many around". And I don't think consolidating everything into google is a good idea; these kind of posts belong on a different network to photos of my holidays.

I'd like it if I didn't need a Google account to read anything on it.

Well be happy then, you don't need a Google account, as can be seen by entering the url in an Incognito window.

The problem arises if you are signed into google elsewhere but not on G+.

Yeah, it's pretty lame that if I'm signed into Google but don't want to accept G+'s real name policy, I can't read otherwise public posts.

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