And also because they didn’t use the features that made Google+ “special” in a way?
Here’s another video that’s worth taking a look at.
As for what you were discussing earlier, this video might be of interest.
You should consider taking a look at these two playlists.
I think you’re right.
Is this any clearer?
I want to capture the essence of the last design. In my opinion, that was the best one (and the one that still holds up today).
This is a more accurate video.
Twitter uses an asymmetric following model, yet it’s doing just fine nowadays.
As we’ve already discussed, the “feed” view is a somewhat massive differentiator. It could most certainly be done VIA a plugin, a theme, a theme-component, etc…
Being able to sort that “feed” view by relevancy and recency is important too. Social media users want to see what’s relevant to them according to an algorithm (something that Discourse doesn’t necessarily employ in the same way), not a list of the top posts during that month or anything like that.
There’s a lot that’s different, so it’s hard to pinpoint anything specific. If we were to comb through everything and look for every single difference that matters, I think we’d be on the right track.
A lot of things that Discourse borrowed just arent as “in-depth” (per se) as the original things that were borrowed in the first place. User profiles are a great example.
The large amount of information shown on screen was a plus (no pun intended).
Well, I think it’s just a matter of figuring out how many plugins (and a purpose for each one) would we need in order to replicate the behaviors of social media. The same goes for themes and theme components.
Who would even be willing to make them for us in the first place? 
Yeah, that was another massive benefit over Facebook and Twitter. Users want control over what they want to see these days. Google+ did that very well. It would fit well in a Discourse social media platform.
Google pivoted their social network to be based around specific interests/communities in late 2015 when they realized that they weren’t going to kill Facebook. It was a last-ditch effort that didn’t save Google+ in its last days. Circles (which Google had been trying to heavily push for since the launch of their social network) were thrown to the wayside.
There was actually a third (and final) refinement though. It was introduced when Google+ was on its last legs and had an imminent death right around the corner. Then again, at least it brought back a very standard feature that Google had previously removed in the late 2015 redesign. Just as a hint, it’s similar to trending topics and trending hashtags on Twitter. 
As a side note, it probably didn’t help that Google+ was originally launched as an invite-only platform. Just take a look at Google+ on the Wayback Machine to see what I mean.
Here’s what the mobile application looked like.
At this point, I’m like a broken record that keeps repeating itself over and over again. Everything you guys have said is great (especially the thoughtful queries, suggestions, and ideas). It’s just hard to digest it all. Maybe we should break this up into small parts instead of putting it all into walls of text in our replies.
Regardless, I think we’re onto something that we’re passionate about here. Alas, I’m not very good at programming or designing (especially when it comes to using Figma). Let’s all work on this as a collaborative team, shall we?
Also, one final thing…
You cannot tell me this doesn’t look like a Google+ rip-off, right? Maybe we’re okay ripping off Google+ ourselves after all…