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

At least for now, you CAN delete only your Google Plus stuff without also removing your Gmail

I'm honestly surprised they didn't learn their lesson with the whole Buzz fiasco. Didn't they get sued over basically forced social connections?

I've got an especially unique last name as well. So much so that I'm absolutely sure nobody in the world has my full name, and, as far as I'm aware, it's possible my dad and I are the only people in the united states with the same first/last name (of the 7 total on facebook, only 3 are in North America). My brother and sister are in a similar boat, thanks to unique spelling of their names. From my last name alone, I'm sure you could track me down with just that and the information that I've been on hacker news.

Probably because of that, I've always been fairly paranoid about using my actual name on most things online, but graduating from a college, participating in research, and having a facebook account pretty much made it impossible to ever be truly anonymous.

Her profile picture is a woman coyly putting something vaguely phallic in her mouth. If it was posted to reddit the slobbering masses would be tripping over themselves to tip their fedoras in her general direction, so imagine what it would be like on YouTube.

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 person, I'd say that YouTube's days as the champ of their segment of the online video world is nearing an end. They'll straggle on with massive volume, courtesy of the barrier to entry that is the cost of streaming zillions of petabytes, but their product will be strongly disliked, and competitors will flourish. I believe users are desperate for a high quality alternative at this point.

I personally don't see that YouTube presents an overwhelming value proposition any longer, compared to the hassle that it's becoming. As it is now, I use a separate browser, in incognito mode, to view YouTube because they're scumbags about trying to force a connection.