I think the idea of circles came from Diaspora.[1]

I've always suspected that Google Plus' design killed it. It was so bloated that it would barely run on my netbook with 4 GB of RAM. I think that if it had looked like Craig's List, without the gaudy Material Design animation, it would have been more successful (seriously). Google does data well and design badly.

[1] https://diasporafoundation.org/getting_started/aspects

It rapidly became clear that the burdens of curation of circles and figuring out which one to use made using GP too much effort. FB does have a mechanism like that but it's barely even known about, while the coarser "group" mechanism does seemingly 95% of what people would want out of circles.

One might consider it an example of "worse is better", though I'm not convinced.

(Wow, just checked and Google+ is still available. I'd thought it had already shut down like Orkut and Wave).

In so much as Google added to "the burden of refinement", in some ways it didn't go far enough. If someone I know posts cat videos and boardgames reviews, and adds me to both Google+ circles, how am I to subscribe to one and not the other?

This problem is bidirectional: which posts of yours will you let me see and of those, which do I want to see. But this is an even heavier ask.

I really loved the concept behind Google Plus. Really sad it didn't work out for them. I used it a lot, but it never felt quite right. Always felt "beta" and not quite polished. Which I was fine with, because I loved the idea behind partitioning my interests and social circles.

I know Facebook allows this to a certain extent, and I've set up a bunch of Facebook lists in the past. But it's much harder to use.

You can do this with Friends Lists in Facebook IIRC (I deleted my Facebook months ago), but it's not as obvious/front and center like it was on Google+

The issue with it not being front-and-center is that it's not the default modus operandi for everyone on the network. It's not just about how I'd want to share my content, but also how I want others to share theirs with me. I'm interested in my friend's adventures building a project, doing art, or starting a business, but not interested in their dog, their exotic tourism pics, or most of their romantic lives except for close friends. It would be nice if everyone I got connected to on my social media filtered me out based on what they knew of me, by default.

Would be even better if you could filter on your end. Users just tag their posts; "Pets," "Kids," "Politics," etc and then you can uncheck any tags from a friend you're not interested in, but leave the rest as-is. Maybe all checked by default but you could uncheck a tag directly on the post that bothers you.

> Users just tag their posts

"Just"?

That would be a disaster. It sounds like something that AI ought to be able to do fairly well, though, so the idea stands.

Defaults matter. A lot. I kind of wish G+ was a more successful competitor as it would have pushed FB to adopt this more thoroughly than tacking on an optional feature.

You can do that with Facebook too. You can make lists and publish posts to specific lists instead of just "Friends". You can also do "Friends except [list]" or "Friends except [person]", too.

I haven't taken much advantage of it, just some here and there. For example, there have been times I've excluded current and former coworkers (I was looking into moving out of town for a while—not anymore though—and I wanted to pick my friends' brains on suggestions for places to move to without it getting back to people I work with that I was thinking of leaving the company). Another example, when I was first beginning my gender transition and I wasn't yet out to the world, I would post about transition-related things to a list that contained the small handful of people who knew I was transitioning. And another, when my former best friend went down an extreme far-right rabbit hole and began posting bigoted statements, including using slurs, against groups that I'm part of, I a) put him and his wife on my Acquaintances list and started making 90% of my posts to "Friends except Acquaintances" and b) made a list of people I trust so I could get support for my feelings of being betrayed without tipping off him or anyone who might tell him (I stopped (a) after he deleted his Facebook account a few months ago... at that point, I threw his wife on my Restricted list, which is hardcoded to hide anything that isn't Public from people on that list).