Beautiful design, but I'm still not going to use it. While G+ has definitely not been successful, at least assuming the stated goals were true, it has spawned some awesome products... Notably, Google Photos is the best photo backup, sharing, and storage system on the planet. Other services like Gmail, Inbox, Hangouts, Calendar, Contacts, and almost every other main consumer product from Google benefited by some of the research and work that went into developing Google+.
I generally log into Google+ for some very niche communities, and that's it. Android developers, Angular, WordPress, and a handful of others. They're more "community like" than, say, StackOverflow, and you can still get decent conversation out of it.
Unfriend or mute those people. FB itself isn't the cause, but I notice people blame the service for bad friends.
Facebook is, in fact, a major part of the problem. The algorithm that decides what you will see is heavily skewed towards shit posting. It far skews to the things that are irrelevant to an actual group of friends or even two individual friends, and favors memes, clickbait, overly dramatic and misleading shares, and other things that can reach a wide audience but are too generalized for two people to actually care about. This is why we have that thread "horrible right wing things your family posts on facebook," because Facebook's algorithm for what items appear in your feed and what items are hidden (or appear later) skews towards the reactionary, provocative, offensive, and so on.
That said, Facebook is still the best way to actually have an event, let people know about it, and have people show up.
My biggest complaint with Facebook over the years has been how far the timeline has moved away from being a timeline and more to a curated list of stories. It's unpredictable when you will get a story from a friend that matters and is relevant to you, even while friend's are making those posts. It also skews towards people who may not actually really be friends with you, and away from people who are actual, real life friends. I'm usually amazed when I go to a friend's profile, one of my best friends in real life who I talk to several times a week, and their feed is filled with things that was never revealed to me in my feed because we don't communicate on Facebook that much. Yet, the random person who I went to High School with who I occasionally like something on their wall regularly has stories appear for me because those 'likes' are an interaction. Facebook has crafted a social network based off of friendships but the algorithm has out-friended itself.
