The real-name policy itself was only known by a small group of people. However, the idea that G+ would be a place for a your One True Identity was directly attacking Facebook, which is not the way in which Facebook was vulnerable. If they had built the entire product (not just the real-name policy) around the idea of pseudonyms or ephemeral identities or multiple identities like Reddit, they may have found more success (but this may not have been aligned with their high-level organizational goals for building G+ in the first place).
But therein lies the problem: people clearly want Reddit. Companies succeed when they find a significant niche where their interests happen to align with that of their users / customers in a significant way. When a company starts putting its own needs ahead of its users that's a huge danger sign for its future. Google arrogantly thought that they could put their own needs first and if they just shove it hard enough at people they can win with brute force. I think that's a terrible mistake.
I'm not a Google+ user (at least not by choice), but as a redditor for 7 years that chart seems to show the correct trends (as far as reddit's growth is concerned, at least).
Ironically, Google inherited the precursor of Reddit, in the form of Google Groups, the interface to what's left of Usenet.
It's also done much to kill that -- the interface is abysmal (actually, so is G+, but that's another story). Even some early G+ support channels which were mediated through Google Groups got killed off. I'd posted some detailed feedback early on (2011) which, so far as I can tell, has been nuked from the face of teh Intarwebs.
Reddit isn't the end-all be-all, but it's damned good. And it carries far more regard and respect than its size would suggest. News items I'm reading about G+ discuss a total staff of over 1200 devoted to it (now largely being reassigned). Reddit's still in the <50 headcount as far as I know.
And yeah: I'd love to see global search (including comments), better tags, better moderation tools, a more powerful wiki, longer self-posts (10k char limit is a bear), and a bunch of other stuff, but it's really quite a useful site as things stand.
Much as HN, despite a pretty limited UI is, largely based on community and dynamics.
Reddit doesn't have photo albums or event organization or realtime video chat or a celebrity/Brand platform or product reviews or search engine integration or any sort of privacy controls or a (first-party) Android app with all these features or (for better or worse) a rich visual UI.
It's not that they should try to be Reddit -- it's that they should try something different. Big companies attack other big companies all time time, and it almost never works when the attack is head-on at the point of the competitor's greatest strength (things like Android are the exception, not the rule). The best way to attack a competitor is with a product that doesn't initially even look like a competitive offering.
Actually, I would read iPhone vs Android as not a true head to head. Androids have always trended towards budget and have generally been a shift towards allowing telecom crapware on them. Two of Apple's weaknesses. :)
Youtube is video reddit (or maybe reddit is text and image youtube). It's my understanding that youtube makes a great deal of money.
More generally, reddit is lots of user generated content that gets page views. What makes facebook's user generated content so much more attractive? The user graph? Have they figured out any good way to monetize that?
I imagine at that point, the "Google identity" dictated what kind of "Internet neighborhood" they felt they had to situate their social network in.
But thinking about it that way, it seems clear that rolling out a product based on "what Google needs to offer" rather than "what people want" is recipe for failure.
But with their ownership of Blogger and YouTube, they were far better positioned to build a Reddit/Disqus/whatever than they were to build a Facebook.
If they had started with the concept of "we're going to build a unified social layer for all our content-posting platforms and then integrate that into a Facebook-like environment" it likely would have gone far better for them than what they did, which is the reverse (build a Facebook-like environment and then use it as a unified social layer for all their content-posting platforms).
