[saljam]

A bit off topic, but is it just me or is the quality of comments on public G+ posts is absolutely terrible? Within a few hours there has been more than 100 replies. Most are inane, rude, of the useless “great post!” type, or just plain old spam. I could only manage to glean about 8 or 9 insightful replies.

Is this something intrinsic to G+? Is it a function of the author's popularity? The discussions here are normally much more sensible, but I would expect HN's readership to have a fairly similar demographic to that of Rob Pike's G+ subscribers.

[dredmorbius]

G+ is fair to middlin' at a bunch of stuff. Comments lack threading. There's poor noise control. Content filtering is limited to "+1" or "flag". There's no "-1" button (though various Chrome extensions have offered this at various points.

The main advantage is that it's a large community (10m+ users presently) initially seeded by Googlers (e.g.: tech-savvy people), and including a few notable luminaries such as Rob Pike. And if you've got the right circles, eventually good content finds its way into your stream. Sometimes (content discover/surfacing is something G+ does surprisingly poorly, and is an area at whch HN, Reddit, and StackExchange win hugely).

[jff]

That was exactly my thought--there were a few thoughtful replies in there, but otherwise just absolute mindless bullshit. It's the same way when Linus makes a post about how he's just updated the code in his preferred emacs editor, spawning 500 posts of "I use Vim!"