[gaius]

such as “sharaholic” or “meme poster” and only visit those circles occasionally.

But people don’t fit neatly into those categories. You’ll miss an important life event from “meme boy” or “share girl” if you’ve filed them neatly away like that. G+ is unpopular because their solution to organising your friends is worse than the competition.

[KozmoNau7]

People can be in multiple circles, it's like a Venn diagram of sorts.

[gaius]

People can be in multiple circles

Sure, but how would you classify Meme Boy in circles so that you don't see his memes but you do see his important life events? Or Share Girl so you don't see what she had for lunch but do see important things?

[BeetleB]

I think the way it would naturally work on G+ is that Meme Boy will use circles this way. So if you get tired of his memes, you message him and ask him to make a Meme Circle and not include you in it.

But really, if Meme Boy enjoys posting memes, he likely already will have a Meme Circle. So you just ask him to remove you from the Meme Circle.

[KozmoNau7]

For Share Girl, you can block the pages she shares from.

For Meme Boy, a baseball bat to the kneecaps works best.

[dageshi]

That's fine?

If you look at facebook's primary purpose as a contacts manager and the secondary purpose as a "keep up with other peoples lives feed", then the primary purpose is still served even if you choose not to see everything everyone shares.