Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It seems to me that the only legitimate use of circles is with respect to people you are sharing with that you know in real life. If you want to talk to total strangers, then you want to be pseudonymous but you also have almost no reason to not post publicly. The typical usecase for circles I've seen (aside from the obvious of protecting privacy) is when someone has multiple interests, not all of which any given con…
Unfortunately G+ circles are not a good fit for the use case you describe, because whether you are permitted to see a post (which certainly should be at the author's discretion) is different from whether you are interested enough to see it in your stream (which should be at yours, but G+ can't handle that).
Re: Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
#171Generally, what someone will do is make a public post with their list of interest based circles, then ask people to reply stating which they'd like to be in. I agree though, this does tend to be rather awkward.