I always liked G+. The technology was some of the best, but it seems that certain people took against it. The media seem to be in love with Twitter. One of the issues was the lack of an API to automate posts, but that also kept the spam down.
With any social site you can't totally control how people use it. If some people decide to take over then they may manage that if they have enough support. On Steemit the whales have the real power. It's going to be interesting to see what direction(s) it takes.
I think the Steemit team is really letting developers run with the API which might more this sthing into something awesome.
I never understood G+, still don't. It's not intuitive and alien.
I always found it clearer than things like FB and Twtr