Need to control your Home Stream? This will help.

Need to control your Home Stream? This will help.

Originally shared by John Skeats

How to Get Rid of Trash in Your Google+ Home Stream

Many Google+ users see a lot of trashy posts in their Home streams -- but many other Google+ users see none because of actions they've taken to prevent the trash. This post will explain what you can do to join the ranks with trash-free Home streams.

Actions to prevent trash from appearing in your Home Stream
Content appears in your Home stream for different reasons. You must take different actions to deal with the content depending on where the trash came from as follows:

* Poorly moderated communities -- Google provides community owners and moderators powerful tools which can guarantee that members would not see inappropriate posts. Unfortunately, not all community owners have chosen to use those tools. If you are seeing inappropriate content from a community, it means the community is not being moderated as well as it could be. There are a huge number of well-moderated communities on literally any subject, so there is no reason to put up with poorly moderated ones. Leave the poorly moderated communities and find others that are well-moderated.

* People you are following -- If people you are following are sharing content you don't want to see, unfollow them or the collections they share those posts in.

* Collections you are following -- If you are seeing inappropriate content in collections you explicitly followed (as opposed to having followed the people who created the collections), unfollow the collections.

* Posts +1ed by people you follow -- If you don't like the kinds of posts that people you follow +1, your best course of action is to unfollow those people.

* Recommendations from Google -- Google occasionally makes recommendations for things they believe you might be interested in. Google tailors that for each person, so much of what they recommend to you can be based on who you follow, what collections you follow, and what communities you are a member of. Taking the actions mentioned above should go a long way towards cleaning up the recommendations you see. If that's not enough, you can turn off those recommendations in Google+ Settings.

Reporting content that violates Google's policies
Google works very aggressively to prevent trashy posts from reaching you, but there is something you can do to help. If you believe that content you see violates Google’s User Content and Conduct Policy (http://www.google.com/+/policy/content.html), please report it. Your reports will be most effective if you also block the people who shared the content and leave them blocked. See the following post for more details about dealing with undesirable content on Google+:
https://plus.google.com/+JohnSkeats/posts/F86Hv3L6kE3