Improve comments and reshares

Google+ is great, but I have always felt that there's something wrong with its sharing and commenting system. 

Imagine that you see a post and that you have something to say about it. Right now you have two options: either share the post and let your followers read what you said (but not the original audience) or comment the post and let the original audience (but not your followers) read it. But never both groups.

Comments are also second-class citizens. You can link to a post, but not to a comment. You can reply to a post, but not to a comment. You can embed posts out of Google+, but you can't embed comments. I know people who write comments on my posts and their comment is much more interesting than my post ever was in the first place. Yet I can't share that to my followers, or start a new conversation from there.

Let's see how to fix that.

Say you start writing a comment to the post. You get the option to also share it to your followers.

Or, let's say that you decide to share the post to your followers and add something of your own. You get the option to also share that as a reply in the original post.

In both cases the result would be the same: your followers should see your comment as a post, right after the original content. This way they would be able to follow the whole conversation. They would be able to reply to your post. They would be able to share your post.

And, of course, they would be able to click any comment that they find interesting, in any conversation in order to see it as a post. And they would be able to share it, or reply to it and start a new conversation from there.

The second problem is, the current system branches conversations when it should not. What if you just want to share an interesting post, but don't have anything to add? Right now you can +1 it (which may show the original conversation to your followers... or may not), or you can share it (which will create a new post). But you have no way to share the original post for sure, complete with its conversation.

An additional downside is that, since a new post is created for everyone that reshared a post, streams can become clogged really quickly. You probably must have noticed that when someone well known writes a popular post and everyone starts sharing it: you get it multiple times in your stream, even thought it's actually always the same post. Isn't that a bore?

Let's see how to fix that.

If I share a post but don't add a comment of my own, let my followers simply see the original post. Let them +1 the original post, let them read the original conversation and add their thoughts to it if they think they have something to say.

If ten people they're following reshare the same post, well, they only get it once. Wouldn't that be nice?

The third problem is that the current approach doesn't work well with Google+ Comments. Conversations in Google+ are only one level deep, but those in Google+ Comments are two levels deep. A post in Google+ becomes a comment in Comments, and a comment in Google+ becomes a reply in comments. Is that easy to grasp? Of course it's not.

So, let's posts simply be posts. Let us use a post to answer another post. Let's forget about comments and replies, and focus on conversations.