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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

Google+ really was on to something with its circles: My friends are easily divisible into groups, and, apart from life events like getting engaged, what I want to share is only really relevant to a specific subset. I know Facebook has groups you can share specific things with, but it's not a feature Facebook has focused on, so even I don't really use it. I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room.

I have found, however, that my Facebook experience has greatly improved once I started hiding posts from people i don't care about as much from my news feed. There are people I still want to be able to check up on now and then, but I don't want to see 99% of the things they have to say. It's like unsubscribibg to junk mail; it makes everything feel wanted and relevant.

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> "Google+ really was on to something with its circles:... I could use google +, but no one else does"

I wonder how much of Google+'s 'use' problem relates to this feature working extremely well.

You section off people you like to keep in contact with, just not on a daily basis. You then don't send most of your day-to-day posts their way. They look at Google+ and see a wasteland.

And whenever they mention Google+, you can't just say "I love it and use it daily; I just put you in the 'Siberia' circle". The only answer is "I don't use it much." Which re-affirms their view of the service as being basically empty.

I find that for tech follows, it works better than twitter and fb... but there's much less signal overall, which is nice... for random musings, I'll glance at a twitter feed now and then... it's more of a highest noise platform to me. FB is mainly to keep up with friends/family, some of whom I'd otherwise never talk/communicate with.

Exactly my experience with tech follows which I enjoy most of all. I've found it entertaining, informative and inspiring. I've never used twitter and stopped using Facebook. Also, so far no issues with spam on G+.

Agreed that Circles are a great idea- and they're just as great on Facebook. I am lucky that I have a relatively small number of friends- categorising them did not take long at all. Now I can post updates to different groups, and it works great.

Even those who can't be bothered to categorise their contacts can use the automatically-generated ones, based on family, location and college/workplace. It's very freeing to be able to ask only close friends in my city if they want to see a movie, or link only those that I have put in the "Techie" group to a great article I found on Hacker News.

The problem with Google+ is that they are so terrified of the user seeing no content, it comes pre-loaded with... well crap. Friends list is empty? Let's import everyone you know, but create 5 separate contacts each. Then spam those people to join because they are not actually on G+. Send them a message? They are not actually there. You cannot hide that your social network is a ghost town by putting fake people in it.

>> but no one else does

You and I apparently have drastically different pictures of G+.

Seriously. I use G+ all the time, although not in the same way people use FB.

I talk to my good friends offline and use G+ for the communities. It's almost like reddit with 90% less trolling.

"90% less trolling" - where's the fun in that!

I have found, however, that my Facebook experience has greatly improved once I started hiding posts from people i don't care about as much from my news feed.

Oddly, I've found the opposite to be true. Apart from clearing out app-request spam, streamlining my facebook feed to only the "friends I care about" tends to result in the most predictable updates. It seems to me the outer-circle friends have the most potential to be interesting.

I agree. I email my friends, or see them in person so I know what's going on in their lives. Too often people only want to analyze facebook as an organizational tool. But there is a great entertainment component built in as well.

You get to learn the kind of personal information about your past acquaintances that otherwise you could only get by going to a reunion. You can find out if anyone you thought would be successful has ended up struggling, if anyone you thought was a slacker has done something interesting, if that person who is attractive, and successful is somehow also a nice person, etc.

Spending a few minutes looking at this kind of trivia can be a lot more fun than yet another youtube cat and the game only gets more interesting the more friends you have on facebook.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I almost want to just do a reset of the feeds I'm blocking. I did such specific blocking that now I really only see posts from the same group of people and most of those peoples most interesting/original thoughts are very certainly not going on Facebook. I've essentially created a large social network only to cut off most of it.

I thought so as well, but I'm not really that interested in "organizing" my friend list. Ideally, yes, I would. But there's too many corner cases and overlapping circles that it's never exactly what I want and it quickly gets out of date.

For me, Facebook did work the way I wanted long ago- people tagged you in photos and it was fun to look at photos of you and your friends. The problem is that in order for Facebook to grow, your feed needs to get broader and broader (status updates, youtube videos) and it gets filled up with things that are not as relevant.

Well, I just set up a few circles when I joined (maybe 7ish), and now whenever I add someone, I quickly tick one or two of the boxes. It's not really high-maintenance.

Totally agree.

80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.

Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed".

Problem (mostly) solved.

> there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room

Spot on....

Primal Scream Therapy: it's quite prevalent in the Internet.

> I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not much of a point to shouting into an empty room.

There hasn't been a generation growing up with Google+ yet.

There really wasn't with Facebook when it got a bit more public, and yet there was orders of magnitude more excitement and buzz when it expanded to certain cities. Google+ may have more users, but Facebook was one of those things that you had conversations about nearly daily, with people not even vaguely involved in the tech scene.

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