Hacker News Reader

No, just whimsy in this case. I haven't been very enthusiastic or made heavy use of G+, but I've found it gradually becoming useful despite minimizing my time spent on it.

Targeted by who? The coverage of G+ seems to be almost consistently negative.

Maybe some social-media marketers have taken "any publicity is good publicity" a little too seriously and decided that bashing G+ is easier than praising it. ;)

Ah, maybe they hired the same advertising firm as the IE team then. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9FAOPBiDk

it's far simpler than that - social news sites like reddit and hn have 'fads' - surges of interest in a topic that involve lots of people posting about it, a bunch of debate, and then a dying off of attention as people move to the next fad. it's not even anything new; the same thing happened on Usenet back in the day, and probably on bbses before that, and in newspaper letter pages even earlier.