How to Get Rid of “What’s Hot” Items From Your Google+ Stream

If you’re a regular Google+ user like me, you probably hate seeing your Google+ stream polluted by lame What’s hot items. After all the time you’ve spent carefully curating circles of informed and articulate people, you still wind up with annoying internet jokes and Hollywood commercial crap plastered into your stream. It’s soooo underwhelming!

Here’s a simple tip for getting rid of those aggravating What’s hot items from your stream.

Here’s how you get rid of What's hot items from your Google+ stream

In Google+, select What’s hot from the left sidebar (under your circles), then drag the resulting volume slider (at the top right of the stream) all the way to the left. 

The slider doesn’t appear unless you click a substream in the left sidebar -- that’s why this tip isn’t immediately obvious.

In theory, What’s hot “highlights selected content thought to be exemplary, interesting, and appropriate: showing you serendipitous and diverse information”, but frankly -- the selection algorithm sucks. Sorry if this sounds elitist, but if when I want to see what everybody is interested in, I go look on Facebook or Twitter.

You can use this volume slider to adjust the number of items you see from individual circles as well! (Simply repeat the above for each circle you want to adjust)

Credit for this tip goes to Becky Cox, who posted this in a reply to a post that I saw in my stream (Google+ lets you link directly to a post, but not to replies, so I decided to do a quick blog entry on it).