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As a general rule of thumb: The general public is not interested in high quality content.

They're much more interested in instant gratification and mindless entertainment, which was sufficiently catered to on the original platforms, so the critical mass of people never switched over.

Another factor surely was that - at the time - reddit was another platform for high quality discussions on specific topics and made it much easier to find like minded people through the subreddit segmentation.

While the circle functionality worked decently in g+, you still had to actually create and join them, which meant it was too exclusionary and involved to really get going.

[bl4ckm0r3]

totally agree with this, quality content is and always will be a niche. a platform that only focuses on that will never be "corporate" good enough and make enough money to justify its existence in companies like google. what twitter and reddit got right (imo) is that they made it easy to filter content based on personal interests.