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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

#91

Post by fibbery »

abalone wrote: post #39
geuis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cant . That's the problem. You automatically get that profile by having a gmail account. They're trying to force you to use that profile for YouTube as well. Google has these incredibly valuable products and that work great separately but they're trying to mash everything together.

False. You can delete just your G+ profile here: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1044503?hl=en

I wish that were true. I have never enabled Google plus, yet there is a profile page out there for me. So when I got to plus.google.com I get the "Set up your account!" page but there is a link for me at https://profiles.google.com/[long number string] that has my full name and gender on it and I can't find any way to delete that profile.

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

#92

Post by chilldream »

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.

I keep asking this question and getting no response, so I'll ask it again:

Is there any evidence that any site anywhere has seen an uptick in comment quality by requiring real names?

Anecdotally, any time I see a news website with Facebook Connect the comments are still swill. While I'd be willing to consider evidence to the contrary, I think this is a false correlation. Observing that anonymous comment threads tend to have more swill than social network threads says nothing. People act more like they would in real life on Facebook because Facebook has always tried to tie your online identity with your meatspace identity. Slapping real names on YouTube accounts makes them easier to stalk, and possibly easier to humiliate outside of the site, but it doesn't stop them from being a conglomerate of barely-literate human beings who are strangers to almost everybody and will rarely interact with each other more than once.

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

#93

Post by Lagged2Death »

She makes some great points, and I agree completely.

But in a sense, by making the great points, we who enjoy some small degree of privacy and anonymity on-line have already given up too much ground. We shouldn't have to make Very Serious Points about sexual harassment or hate crimes. As if a solution to those (quite real) problems would then make on-line anonymity moot.

The fact is, I like being pseudonymous on the web, and as it's not a situation I've been abusing, that is reason enough to allow it to continue to be possible. That's just the way a free society rolls. Freedom of choice is (supposedly) one of the core values of the nation that spawned Google in the first place.

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

#94

Post by graue »

adventured wrote: post #28
minimaxir wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bandwidth issue is a small obstacle for a potential competitor (solvable by venture capital) relative to the issue of video copyrights and offensive content moderation.

I definitely agree on the copyrighted content problem. The VC issue is interesting. It would probably cost... hundreds of millions of dollars in capital over a few years to compete with YouTube properly (requiring HD, long length video), given the time it will most likely take to get up to speed on revenues / build a functioning business model, and the speed at which adoption often happens these days with successful…

> Snapchat, which thrived partially due to 'offensive' content

Assuming you mean sexting, I think the percentage of sexually explicit images sent on Snapchat has been wildly exaggerated — by tech journalists looking for clicks, and by older folks not in Snapchat's target market who don't really get the point. Snapchat's appeal for everyday, non-sexual use seems to go over the heads of most tech people I know, but has been described eloquently by, e.g., Nathan Jurgenson[1] and Dustin Curtis[2].

Porn on Tumblr and sexts on Snapchat make for interesting headlines, but I'd hesitate to credit either as a major reason for the platform's success without actual numbers on its prevalence. To my knowledge those numbers don't exist.

1. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/pics-and-it-didnt-happen/

2. http://dcurt.is/photos-for-communication

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

#95

Post by chilldream »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #45
BEEdwards wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp.

I have to say I've been amused at the people exploiting the combo of "no character limit" and "collapse button at the end of the post" by tacking public domain novels on the end of innocent-seeming posts.

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

#96

Post by minor_nitwit »

shittyanalogy wrote: post #27

Also, people are different in different situations. People are different on youtube than they are on tumblr than they are on pinterest than they are on twitter than they are with their family than they are at the DMV than they are at a night club than they are .... People aren't a personality attached to a name they're who they want to be at any given time and personalities change. This kind of forced identity is not…

Yes, context-switching is normal. People often take on different personalities that are dependent upon the person that they are dealing with.

I'll let George handle the rest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPG3YMcSvzo

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

#97

Post by JSZZHlmumeUE »

dbpatterson wrote: post #85
JSZZHlmumeUE wrote: post #24

What is the frequency with which these prompts to connect show up? I use youtube daily, G+ not at all and I've only seen them twice. These instances were at least a few months apart. In both cases, I opted out of connecting my profiles and nothing has happened since. Are some people getting these prompts more often? Why? Maybe someone on the G+ team can explain this. without deleting my entire G+ account and profile…

Errm. How do you get everyone to start using a different email address in 3 minutes? This has been their brilliant (and awful - I don't use gmail, and _hate_ this) move - to get people to use an address@gmail.com, so there is no way you can ever take it anywhere else (because even if you want to forward, you have to keep the account active).

The three minutes was for how long it takes to setup Thunderbird to backup your Gmail.

I'm very happy with Gmail and it's way better than all the other e-mail services that various entities force me to use, but the point I was making is that I could move out of Gmail with all my data if I wanted to.

> so there is no way you can ever take it anywhere else

The standard solution is to setup a google apps on your domain.

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

#98

Post by threeseed »

EGreg wrote: post #52
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…

I don't think everyone has to leave Google for you to have productive anonymous discussions. For what it's worth, I think reputations (under anonymous usenames) are A very important component in having accountability and quality in discussions.

Anonymity is vital for many types of discussions.

Can you imagine HN working if people were required to put their name and job titles ? Just because someone works for Microsoft for example does that make their support or criticism of the company any less valuable. Or what about all the political discussions where there could be legitimate fears of reprisal by government agencies.

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

#99

Post by tesseractive »

waqf wrote: post #87
jmillikin wrote: post #51

The YouTube/Google+ integration would have been much smoother if it started by giving every existing user a G+ "Page" identity matching their YouTube name, and making that page their default YouTube identity. From the user's perspective there would be no risk of accidentally connecting their legal name to YouTube, and Google would have achieved their goal of a unified login system.

This. It's too bad Google conflated their technical goal of a unified login system with their policy goal of whatever-their-policy-goal-is — probably something to do with knowing more about their users and/or getting them to interact with social features more.

Which is pretty funny to me, because this flat-out guarantees that I will not use their social features. As a currently non-transitioning trans woman, there are a great many YouTube videos that I enjoy but absolutely can not have associated with my legal name.

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

#100

Post by Anderkent »

threeseed wrote: post #98
EGreg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think everyone has to leave Google for you to have productive anonymous discussions. For what it's worth, I think reputations (under anonymous usenames) are A very important component in having accountability and quality in discussions.

Anonymity is vital for many types of discussions. Can you imagine HN working if people were required to put their name and job titles ? Just because someone works for Microsoft for example does that make their support or criticism of the company any less valuable. Or what about all the political discussions where there could be legitimate fears of reprisal by government agencies.

> Just because someone works for Microsoft for example does that make their support or criticism of the company any less valuable.

It does not make it less valuable, but it does change how we interpret it. If I found myself commenting on my current (or previous) workspace, I'd feel obligated to disclose my relationship.

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