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Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

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Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#41

Post by straws »

adventured wrote: post #10

I think Google is choosing a particularly terrible point to start alienating users of YouTube. It seems like everywhere I go online these days, the YouTube hatred is universal. It's regarded as uncool, boring, obnoxious, and just generally yesterday's news. This is merely an observation, however a few years ago I rarely saw the kind of negative sentiment toward YouTube that is now very common. If I were a betting per…

Youtube's strength has never been as a portal, but as infrastructure. They tried feeding video bloggers with video responses (though that feature is going away), there are channels, which were always terrible to navigate, and there is of course the cesspool of comments. Youtube grew huge because it was easy to embed stuff and link to and upload with.

So what's the high barrier to entry that you're talking about? Vimeo has its creative community and Wistia has great embedding tools, but what other sort of niches do you see popping up that steal power users away from Youtube? What sort of business plans even make sense without Google's infrastructure and deep pockets?

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#42

Post by dethstar »

BEEdwards wrote: post #40
fat0wl wrote: post #23

I think anonymity on the internet is a great thing. It's a place where you can socialize and share ideas with strangers without having to give them your name/address/home phone #. You can even start honest, more controversial discussions and do some high-level reasoning that you couldn't necessarily achieve with close friends. If Google won't allow that on their services anymore, I pray everyone leaves them & moves t…

The problem is that anonymity leading to great conversation is disproved by reality. This move, though short sighted and ill advised, is precisely to combat the cluster fuck that is YouTube comments powered by anonymity. I'm not sure what the solution is, but one look at the quality of anonymous unmodderated comments calls for one.

Has the quality of the comments gone up? No. Now, they are giving people who don't mind bullying people under their own name access to people that dare to call them out on their shitty behavior.

Edit: is the quality of the comments on sites like 9gag or those others that use the facebook comment system better than that of youtube that they should've felt inspired to make this move? Is it less racist,misogynistic or less of any kind of hate towards anyone?

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#43

Post by jalfresi »

BEEdwards wrote: post #40
fat0wl wrote: post #23

I think anonymity on the internet is a great thing. It's a place where you can socialize and share ideas with strangers without having to give them your name/address/home phone #. You can even start honest, more controversial discussions and do some high-level reasoning that you couldn't necessarily achieve with close friends. If Google won't allow that on their services anymore, I pray everyone leaves them & moves t…

The problem is that anonymity leading to great conversation is disproved by reality. This move, though short sighted and ill advised, is precisely to combat the cluster fuck that is YouTube comments powered by anonymity. I'm not sure what the solution is, but one look at the quality of anonymous unmodderated comments calls for one.

Personally I think the problem is the concept of comments in the first place. You see, way back in the day, if you wanted to respond to a post or whatever on the web you went to your own website and posted a response and linked to the source you were responding to. Comments sections on websites are data islands; comments and conversations held captive in walled gardens. Youtube is the biggest irony of all as it has the concept of video responses, yet they prefer you to respond in tiny teeny little comment boxes. I say scrap the comments section and prove a big red "record a video response" button next to each video.

Of course I appreciate the irony of my comment about comments appearing on a site with comments, but I've always regarded sites like hacker news and slashdot as "forums where the post is a link to an article".

I'd much prefer it if everyone has a wordpress site or equivalent and posted their opinions on that. At least the web would be more webby and you wouldn't have greedy centralised sites gobbling up content and demanding control of the conversation.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#44

Post by marvin »

BEEdwards wrote: post #40
fat0wl wrote: post #23

I think anonymity on the internet is a great thing. It's a place where you can socialize and share ideas with strangers without having to give them your name/address/home phone #. You can even start honest, more controversial discussions and do some high-level reasoning that you couldn't necessarily achieve with close friends. If Google won't allow that on their services anymore, I pray everyone leaves them & moves t…

The problem is that anonymity leading to great conversation is disproved by reality. This move, though short sighted and ill advised, is precisely to combat the cluster fuck that is YouTube comments powered by anonymity. I'm not sure what the solution is, but one look at the quality of anonymous unmodderated comments calls for one.

You're missing 50% of the picture here. Anonymous, unmoderated discussion in an uneducated crowd is the worst of both worlds. Obviously.

But anonymous, moderated discussion in a forum of disciplined and/or informed, educated users is better than the same discussion in a forum where all the identities of the participants are known, precisely for the reasons fat0wl outlined. You can look to any of the heavily moderated reddit communities for a great demonstration of this (AskScience, /r/sex, /r/fitness etc). Even cherry-picking the good parts of 4chan will make it blatantly obvious that anonymity, in a controlled setting, is a very good thing for the level of discourse.

The comment quality on many of these forums far surpass anything that you will see on politically correct Facebook, which is the opposite end of the spectrum: Most people, apart from a few loudmouths, will be exceedingly polite and well-behaved when all their friends are watching. And this leads to poor debate and boring discussion.

Even on Hacker News, I would refuse to contribute if I had to post with my full name. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is simply that I do not wish future employers to be a Google search away from a detailed record of all my personal, political and professional opinions. This is simply a reflection on the fact that the reality of public discourse has changed in the world of search engines. Anonymity (pseudonymity) and moderation is the only way to resolve this problem.

In short, Google has the complete wrong idea. Which is actually quite shocking; Google should know better than anyone the realities of public discourse on the Internet.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#45

Post by vezzy-fnord »

BEEdwards wrote: post #40
fat0wl wrote: post #23

I think anonymity on the internet is a great thing. It's a place where you can socialize and share ideas with strangers without having to give them your name/address/home phone #. You can even start honest, more controversial discussions and do some high-level reasoning that you couldn't necessarily achieve with close friends. If Google won't allow that on their services anymore, I pray everyone leaves them & moves t…

The problem is that anonymity leading to great conversation is disproved by reality. This move, though short sighted and ill advised, is precisely to combat the cluster fuck that is YouTube comments powered by anonymity. I'm not sure what the solution is, but one look at the quality of anonymous unmodderated comments calls for one.

If anything, at best this has left the comment quality unchanged. Now you have people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp.

Personally I don't think YT comments, for all their vulgarity and chaos, required any "solution". They were cesspools, but ultimately cesspools of humanity. There is absolutely no reason one couldn't ignore them if they found them so distressing.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#46

Post by FreeKill »

Yeah, this issue actually drives me crazy. I liked using Google+ as sort of a blogging platform, and I constantly linked to a lot of videos from youtube. (I've never had a youtube account, never posted a comment).

So, the other day, I link to a video I found interesting, and I notice I'm getting a lot more comments than usual. Problem is, they are all along the lines of "OMG, Why are idiots continuing to use hash tags" or "WTF man, who gives a shit about this video"

Just pure vitriol, where before the people who actually followed me on Google+ were at least respectful. As a result, I've basically resigned to not posting anything from youtube anymore because there is no way to disassociate yourself with the people who visit youtube.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#47

Post by rhizome »

lignuist wrote: post #30

So what is the next coup? Linking all the comments from the past that you wrote when you were thinking it was pseudonymous to your real name? My only recommendation: Get out of such services as fast as possible.

Keep in mind that Google owns the old Deja News Usenet archive...

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#48

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

Zirro wrote: post #35
patrickaljord wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women tend not to have penises.

I am sure you were joking, but to clarify and expand: Why do men seek contact with the opposite sex more frequently than women? Why do they tend to do so in a way that seems to bother the woman in question? Why are women not doing the same to men?

Because it costs far more for women than men to have children, biologically speaking.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#49

Post by marvin »

mongol wrote: post #36
lignuist wrote: post #30

So what is the next coup? Linking all the comments from the past that you wrote when you were thinking it was pseudonymous to your real name? My only recommendation: Get out of such services as fast as possible.

I _think_ this has happened because I have seen comments on Youtube with real name (or at least appearing to be real names) that I can't believe someone would leave with their real names attached to it. But still speculation on my part

It could just be that they did leave the comment on purpose, though. Most online newspapers in my country have switched to a full-name policy over the last year, and you wouldn't believe the things people manage to spew out even when their full name and photo are attached to the post.

I am increasingly convinced that full-name discussion => fewer moronic comments is a fallacy. Or at the very least a vastly overestimated correlation.

Re: Dear Googles: G+/YouTube Anschluss – you've done outed me

#50

Post by brigade »

lignuist wrote: post #30

So what is the next coup? Linking all the comments from the past that you wrote when you were thinking it was pseudonymous to your real name? My only recommendation: Get out of such services as fast as possible.

At this point, everyone really needs to decide whether all of their usage of Google services will be linked to their real-life identity, or none whatsoever (and migrate all usage of Google services linked to their real-life identity elsewhere)

Maintaining multiple distinct identities through various Google services is only going to become harder, and with shit like this I wouldn't trust even completely separate Google logins to maintain distinct identities in the future.

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