Google+ announces it's bringing back Events feature, will now hide “low quality” comments, and is sunsetting its old web UI on January 24
Google overhauled Google+ from top to bottom in late 2015 to shift the focus to communities. The company has been tweaking …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-arc for a product Google had already repositioned: the late-2015 redesign stripped Google+ down to Communities and Collections, and an August 2016 moderation and notifications overhaul kept tightening that focus. The January 2017 batch — Events returning, algorithmic hiding of "low quality" comments, the old web UI dying January 24 — is another step in converting Google+ from a general social network into a managed communities product.
Viewed against what follows in the coverage, these tweaks read as end-stage curation rather than growth investment: within two years Google announced the consumer shutdown for April 2019, and even the enterprise successor Currents was later slated for wind-down.
First-order effects
- Users still on the legacy web interface are force-migrated to the redesigned UI by January 24, ending the opt-in period opened in late 2015.
- Community moderators gain automated "low quality" comment suppression on top of the manual moderation tools rolled out in August 2016, while event organizers get back a scheduling feature lost in the redesign.
Second-order effects
- The comment-hiding shift moves moderation labor from volunteer moderators to Google's own classifiers, raising the bar for what smaller communities must match if they moderate elsewhere.
- Feature pruning continues the pattern set by Hangouts On Air being pushed to YouTube Live: standalone Google+ capabilities get absorbed into dedicated products rather than maintained in place.
Third-order effects
- The sequence — redesign around a niche, automate moderation, retire legacy surfaces, then shut the consumer product entirely in April 2019 per the shutdown notice — is a template for how Google sunsets underperforming social properties while migrating surviving use cases to enterprise offerings like Currents.
The trend: Google's social strategy was contracting from a general-purpose network to a curated communities product, with each 2016–2017 tweak presaging the eventual consumer shutdown.