[haberman]

Can't you configure what gets delivered as a notification? If you're so popular that people are adding you to circles all the time, can't you just turn those notifications off?

[mbrubeck]

As far as I can tell, you can customize email and phone notifications, but you can't customize the notifications that appear under the red alert number on Google web pages. (I might be missing something.)

[neilk]

I like to think of the red alert number as my "score". The higher it gets the more I know I'm ignoring useless distractions.

[caffleine]

There's a "Who can send you notifications?" section on the settings page which allows you to configure who can send you notifications that trigger the red alert.

[acdha]

This does not actually work for being added to circles.

[nailer]

Try this instead: https://github.com/mikemaccana/japanese_mayonnaise

[acdha]

I'm becoming increasingly strict avoiding things like that: if Google doesn't care about wasting my attention, why help them by using their service?

[acdha]

For a few things, yes, but there's no way to disable the Google-wide badge or the iOS push notification badging.

I ended up deleting my Google+ account because that was the only way to avoid this constant badge spam.