221–230 of 282 posts
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I'm sorry, but hearing geeks talk about quitting google as if it's some personal triumph (in nearly every google thread) makes the sentiment seem even more tone deaf and futile.
Sometimes thought leaders need to light the way when issues are not apparent to the masses. I have been saying for a long time that having companies own our identities is a bad idea.
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Funny. Your first link returns http://www.youtube.com/oops and I don't have these options under general account settings: http://i.imgur.com/yOny4pC.png What works for Youtube is to create another channel and use that channel and the created page to post comments via pseudonym. I can switch between my original Google Account and the newly created channel. I don't have an option for my primary account through. For thi…
Interesting, I wonder if this is different in different countries. I'm in the UK, maybe that's the difference? Or potentially the age of the account?
I linked the Channel to my Google+ accounts a few weeks ago.
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The point is that it makes stalking much more efficient and there's no way to protect oneself from it on YouTube without changing the profile pic. The current #1 submission on HN is from a woman slamming google for this problem [1]. On the YouTube side the poster of the current top comment on the Miley Cyrus video is getting hostile replies based on the profile pic being of a very young girl. [1] https://plus.google.…
If you read the comments on that post or the HN thread you would see that you can link your YT identity to a G+ "page", where you can set the name and profile pic to whatever you want. It sounds like your real issue is with the fact they haven't made this more widely known, or part of the conversion flow. Your original complaint still makes no sense to me and just reads like more of the same knee/circle-jerk reaction…
1. The youtube comment section is a cesspool of hate and abuse.
2. Lots of minors use youtube and have extensive histories of liked videos and comments tied to their youtube account.
3. Google made an unexpected change from anonymity to requiring a linked Google+ account for commenting.
4. Google+ profile pics are automatically displayed alongside comments. This applies retroactively to all comments, not just ones made after the Google+ requirement change.
5. youtube users, even technical ones, may not be able to figure out how to workaround the problem of wanting a separate youtube profile pic from their Google+ profile pic.
6. In a matter of seconds you can find a comment from a minor based on their profile pic.
7. Clicking on the profile allows you to see the entire history of comments and likes of said minor.
8. Most minors have not yet realized this fact.
9. Google has irresponsibly increased the danger to minors without giving clear instructions for mitigating this.
10. Minors are just one of many classes of users negatively affected by this.
Ergo, Google screwed up big time, making a mockery of their "don't be evil" motto.
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What is the difference? All they are doing is giving you a different way of accessing them. It's the same bloody company! It's not like they've created and passed the photos on to someone else, they're just in a bucket with "picasa" written on it.
I don't think that is the point being made. The point is that there's been a lack of transparency on Google's behalf, and a lot of users, like myself, have grown tired of it.
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Or the other obvious interpretation is - they place pretty much zero value on their users (or perhaps even a negative value on those whiny privacy conscious tech-crowd users that hang out on commie un-monetized sites like HN…).
That's a very strange interpretation to me. They clearly care a lot about G+. So why would saying G+ > users imply that the value of users is small?
Not a google employee, but this disgusting mistreatment of its users may actually be a good thing if it blows up in their faces. My prediction is that the change to automatically showing the users g+ profile pic next to comments will be what gets them in hot water by empowering stalkers and trolls. Here's a simple example, if you go to the video for Miley Cyrus - Wrecking Ball, there are the usual back and forth comm…
Former Googler here. The vast majority of Googlers do not approve of G+ policies. However, Google has never been run democratically and most of the time that's probably a good thing. Furthermore, the management has been much less forthcoming than usual about the thinking behind these policies. What they have said varies and usually sounds like excuses. In short, don't expect actual information in this thread.
For me, this is the most critical statement in the entire Google+ saga. Most Google employees do not approve of a strategy that google is betting its future on. Has this ever happened before? Probably never before. And to me, it marks a clear beginning of the end of google as we knew it. The google we grew up loving was a google that put product quality before anything else. Everything else(such as market share) was a result of a good product. This is no longer true.
I don't think it's G+ being more important than the users, I think it has more to do with YouTube. Currently, G+ is for nerds who care about anonymity and all the other things that Google is being criticized here. That's fine, I'm one of them.
However, YouTube is a shithole and it's likely that YT people don't care as much about what they sign into as long as all their stuff is there. That Google would try to move YT users on to G+ makes sense in a "slum clearance[1]" way.
The Real Name vs. Nicknymity thing is a real problem, and for me I don't think Google is handling right, but I do think they're handling it in a way that is not out of line with the values of a stereotypical corporate bureaucracy.
Google wants to know the real names of everybody on its services, I get that, but users who value theirs and others' internet identity do so regardless of whether it's under a real name or a nickname. That Google has been found to be getting back alley sex from the US Government does not help their case for knowing who you really are.
In my more cynical moments I think comments and such are a ruse to get more PII from their users for law enforcement purposes. But YT is also a shithole, and the ad rates against combined-identity demographics ain't sour neither.
1. http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/30/the-controversial-legacy-...
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> It leads to idiotic decisions like killing Google Reader instead committing to serving a long tail of diverse communities. Reader was even more significant than that: had they actually been trying to make Google+ a desirable service, first-class integration with Reader would have brought a large, very active core of G+ users to launch the new service. Instead, they shipped something which had obviously had almost n…
I've had nothing buy a joyous experience there. Spam? Don't add spam to your activity feed. Just remove it from your circles, gone. An intern built it? It's one of the most finely crafted, expensive looking pieces of social software that has ever been built. Excuse me but what the hell is this fantasy about Google plus? I'm not convinced that Reader was shut down and that Google plus was meant to be its replacement,…
Glad you like it. I find it slow, clunky, limited, and information poor. And annoying, because it always puts pointless design tricks ahead of functionality.