I loathe the current G+ “trending” crap. I made a userstyle (works with Stylish, may also work as a userscript with Chrome or with Greasemonkey) that reclaims your space without a whole lot of fancy code crap. It’s a fork of another person’s work, but theirs hadn’t been updated for a couple months…
You can get the code (and install it) over here at userstyles.
Screencap below (also saved because of the delightful troll in Wil Wheaton’s comments area; man, if anyone was calling for a Loving Mallet of Correction…)