[alexschleber]

I've been saying the same thing for ages... there even was a hashtag around at the time in 2012 if I recall... #waronwords

Google could never decide if they wanted to G+ to basically be Instagram (not surprising given Horowitz' Yahoo/flickr background), or if there was something to be done along the Interest Graph angle a la Reader / HN / Reddit / asf. The info density for the latter has always been terrible on G+, not to speak of various other iniquities that text-heavy posts (or post shares) had to endure for years, like much smaller images in the stream for the longest time.

Really they should have just split these two use cases into either two separate apps (maybe to prescient for 2011), or at least provided alternative UI views. Of course, a solid API including Write could have solved it as well as you alluded to.