As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+.

Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.)

I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.

Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.

As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.