From my experience, you can do this even after you join.

I said do it before you join to save people in a similar situation.

This is false. Google has many staff UI designers and does tons of internal testing and UI research. (We have rooms with one-way mirrors all over the place, just for UI research.) It's likely that you find the privacy settings difficult because Google+ does a lot, and privacy settings are, in fact, difficult.

Very scary. What else are they going to "integrate" without asking me??

Why is this scary, other than the fact that it's different from what's happened in the past? Was the Chat / Mail integration scary too?

Good design isn't primarily about UI research and one way mirrors. It's having a design vision for what you want to be, and how you communicate that to your users. Simplicity and ease of use are important factors too.

As this thread points out Google utterly fails at this. The top comment is "I have no idea how this thing works"

They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles to chat, but making it automatic seems silly.

I've kept my Google+ account limited to just friends and family, and I've found it amazingly helpful for them to be added to chat. I used to use irssi+bitlbee, but now I find it easier to just open Google+ and find people to talk to.

Ultimately, I think your Google+ experience is going to be a product of your expectations. I've talked to my family members that aren't computer programmers, and they like all the defaults for Google+. You might not, for the same reason that I run my own mail server -- we're weird, and we're the 0.00001% that doesn't matter to anyone trying to make a product for hundreds of millions of users. (It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.)

(Another problem might be apathy. Internally at Google, our software is so integrated that it would make Apple cry. Unfortunately, it's all geeky stuff that 99.999% of the world doesn't even know exists. Because we have it so good, we might not even consider the fact that our users aren't as lucky.)

Google+ is a social network. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it can be successful by forcing users to use it in a specific way. If the people using the service want to leverage the service in a certain way, there doesn't seem to be anything "wrong" with that. In fact, I'd argue that Google should take such usage as feedback into improving the service to better incorporate the new usage patterns.

EDIT: This perhaps should go as it's own comment, but I'm going to throw it here for the time being:

People like to use social networks as a public publishing platform as well as a way to share with friends. This is to some extent supported by Google, as they have encouraged people to use G+ as a blogging platform. The behavior we see with the HN circle is (I'd argue) just people attempting to hack functionality onto public side of G+, which IMHO is a part of G+ that is sorely lacking.

Um... Isn't that the reason "circles" in Google+ exist? To draw lines?

It's why we read HN instead of Reddit or Slashdot: mostly to be different.

I don't think anyone only "reads" one community. According to interest, one participates in many?

Personally, I found all this quite confusing (and just when I figured how to "circle"; doh, limit has been reached for adding people. But, you can start adding tomorrow!)... and following the advice of sp332 and betterth, I avoided falling into blunders like Google adding all 1000+ contacts to my Gtalk or notifying each and everything that ever happens in G+ universe.

Moreover, since now people are split inside circles, am I supposed to update the circle manually everyday?

If this is supposed to be a social network, why are these limitations in place?

As for the chat/mail integration, I didn't like it either. It filled my gchat with hundreds of useless contacts from gmail.

That's another great point: Did they not even test these features, not even once? The gmail/chat integration sucked, and it filled my gchat buddy list of a number of users I'd emailed -once- in my life without ever asking me if I wanted to suddenly be chat-buddies with them, sharing my away/idle/etc information, etc.

I'm sorry but Google has always sucked at privacy and I find it funny that you use something as poor as the chat/mail integration as an example.

Please be gentle