Bradley Horowitz on Google+ naming policy | Hacker News Reader

Bradley Horowitz on Google+ naming policy

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43 pointsphil40 comments

Several commenters on this post claim this is an issue of safety:

"The ability to add nicknames/maiden names etc is of no use to people who actually need to keep their identity secret for their own or their family's safety."

"There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons for someone to need, not just want, to use pseudonym."

I'm sorry, but you don't need to use Google+. And for the love of Peter please don't if you'll endanger yourself or your family.

Wanting to remain anonymous on Google+ is like going to a dinner party and insisting on wearing a mask. Yes, you'll reduce the chance that people will know who you are—but you're also super freakin' creepy. If you don't want to be recognized...stay home or go to another party!

And if you don't want to share your real identity online, I'd recommend not using social networks altogether.

or, for these particular people -- just use a fake name. Not starpony76, but Mike Jones or Jane Smith. Google does not need to allow starpony76 to allow you to be Mike Jones or Jane Smith. They will happily allow you to be perfectly safe as Jane Smith.

Conversely, don't post anything publicly and lock down your profile. My profile on G+ has my name. That's it. If someone "found" me on G+, they find my name. If they are stalking me, they already know my name I would guess. They won't get anything else unless I choose to give it to them. Which is broadly similiar to me choosing to email something to them. Don't message your stalker!

There are plenty of good positive reasons in the "pro" camp for allowing any kind of name someone wants to call themselves, including starpony76. But there are also plenty of good reasons to oppose it. Like not having a network filled with ridiculous spammy, crude, borderline offensive names just (primarily) because people like being clever.

If you don't like someone's name, you don't have to circle them, and you can always block them if they insist on commenting on your public posts (which they probably won't be doing anyway).

(Oh, and if they are spam, please report them as spam: Google cares a lot about ridding spam, and that is an entirely separate issue from "starpony76".)

Every single thread I read at G+ would be filled with their names, its not my public posts I'm worried about -- it quite possibly destroys the value of everyone elses public posts for me. There would be no escape from it, I am not going to block every SEO EXPERT XChange, Mr Piddles, Big Johnson, L33tB0Y username that would innundate every well known and heavily followed G+ user. I'll just get annoyed instead.

I am not comparing the trauma of tasteless names everywhere to being stalked -- but it would quite possible keep me from wanting to use the site. Along with a lot of other people. Which also has the effect of causing the person you are talking about not wanting to use it, either.

Any name you want was allowed for Buzz, and was certainly a turn off.

Is this a common complaint about Twitter? I have never heard this as the reason someone won't use Twitter: the argument seems to come from a minority of users who come out of the woodwork to back services like Google+ during issues like this.

(In essence, I find it interesting that you chose to pull Buzz as your first-line example, despite the fact that Buzz failed for all kinds of other reasons against a competitor that seems to have no trouble with an "any name goes" policy.)

I don't know what a common complaint is against Twitter. But Google+ shares Buzzes stream/comment structure exactly -- in that comments on a post are heavily highlighted and constantly thrust in front of you. I don't just follow X, I follow X+ whoever comments on his posts, and my stream is very highly reactive to those comments.

Twitter does not work like G+ does. G+ does however work exactly like Buzz does in this respect (for public posts).

I consider myself a fairly regular guy, and yes the naming (among other things, but the ridiculous names of people I'm not following, specifically) annoyed me to no end on Buzz. So yes, considering G+ is a Buzz clone when it comes to public posts and comments -- it will annoy me on G+, and I assume I'm not alone.

Buzz is the most perfect first-line example that exists.

For accuracy, do you mean "whomever comments on posts you comment on"? As far as I've been able to tell, comments on posts you do not "have any stake in" do not appear on your stream.

Perhaps you are thinking of notifications, they behave as you describe. I am talking about my stream, or someone elses stream of posts, or a post as a unit. The comments ride along with all of them, in their entirety. They may be in some state of partial collapse, but they are always there.

Looking at my stream, by screen space the comments generally occupy about 1/3 as much real estate as the parent post. On posts I've never interacted with.

This is by design obviously -- and when the comments are good, its great. When the comments are bad, its bad. Time will tell whether G+ ends up with the type of community that can support this very in your face community intensive model.

This problem was solved by Biz on Twitter when they stopped showing you @replies to people if you don't follow the person replying.

I actually find twitter names to be fairly annoying. I've never actually voiced that opinion though since the facebook sharing model seems useful and the twitter sharing model always seemed useless to me (the only actual use I have ever been aware of is that some publishers use it as a worse RSS feed). The <140 character messages from people I don't really know are a sizable portion of Facebook, and are always by far the worst part of it.

Pseudonym vs actual name is correlated to that spectrum but not a direct relationship. People's stupid names is definitely something that makes interactions on reddit, AIM, video games, twitter, etc feel really immature to me compared to Facebook.

Ok, so when someone is being stalked by someone they simply don't get to use the Internet anymore. I guess that really was a pretty clean solution: deleting them from modern society and isolating them from the friends and support groups they rely on, and telling them that they certainly shouldn't tell other people about their problems or oppressions in public, does quite rapidly sweep that whole issue under the rug. Wish I had thought of that one...

What kind of support is that, when it can only be provided by a service that is not even one month old? The way you put it, it makes it sound as the only possible way for people to reach out privately to others in their trusted circle is through their computers/smartphones.

The OP is right. If privacy/concern of safety is so important to some people, they should re-evaluate their need for this product.

The OP has made a general claim about /all social networks/, not just G+. In some cases his sentences specifically state "Google+", but none of the arguments are Google+ specific, and his comment ends with an explicitly general recommendation.

> Ok, so when someone is being stalked by someone they simply don't get to use the Internet anymore.

Google+ != the internet.

I hope you realize that you can fine tune every bit of your profile to hide sensitive information (and show it to the right circles). The stalker would only be able to see that [someone] has a Google+ profile...

The goal should be that people who are being stalked, which could be anyone (and frankly will probably be me soon: I already get the occasional death threat), should be able to participate in discussions on important subjects (possibly about death threats and stalking online) /in public/ without divulging their identity. The person I responded to seems to claim that people in that situation should simply give up: that social networks are simply not an option for them. To me that is as damaging to society as claiming that people who can't see shouldn't be attempting to use a computer, as "duh: they can't see it or read anything or stuff".

Well the way I see it is it's something that would be nice but in no way should be demanded from a service like Google+.

For some people (not me), this is an issue of safety; I somewhat agree with you that people who genuinely need to protect their identity from The Internets might be better off not using social networking. There are some corner-cases, like famous people who want to be online to communicate with their fans, and with their families, but don't want their families to have to deal with unwanted publicity, but the number of people in the world who are that famous is very small.

For me, the bigger issue is correctness: through various quirks of history, different groups of people know me by different, unrelated names, and I'd like my friends to be able to recognise me as we encounter each other in this new medium. Pseudonymity is a different thing to anonymity.

I just don't understand why people are so against Google over this, when Facebook has always been doing it.

I know it's a delicate issue and it deserves debate, but at least I'd like the issue being discussed in a more general setting.

That being said, I think it would be another advantage of Google+ over Facebook to allow people to use pseudonyms, because it's yet another thing Facebook would never change.

I think pseudonyms might have the same problem that too much customization over myspace profiles drove people to facebook; people are stupid and don't do what is best for them. More customization of profiles has probably been the #1 request on facebook since it's inception and they have deliberately not launched it, which ends up being what the people actually want despite what they think they want.

Everyone wants to be able to set their profile to their favorite color and have their favorite song autoplay, but no one wants to see other peoples crappy color schemes or hear their music that you don't like. Lots of people want to have some random name on Google+ but people don't want to interact with a bunch of people named "vagtastic" or "bluntzzz".

I just don't understand why people are so against Google over this, when Facebook has always been doing it.

Because we wouldn't be interested in Google+ if we thought it would just be another Facebook?

I mean, if the fresh launch of a beta product to an audience of mainly tech-savvy users is not the time to complain loudly about what you don't you like, what is?

Yes,

I'd been rooting for Google, against Facebook on this. Till now..

But now... The thing is that Facebook so far mostly has just made noise about not allowing pseudonyms - I've only seen them ban obvious organizations from using individual accounts and then only when someone complains. If you're locked out of your Facebook account, you have to show state ID. But it's a lot easier to just another "fake" account (which is not really particular fake if it is you representing you).

I'm in a somewhat "special" neck of the woods on Facebook but I'd say more than half my friends use pseudonyms on there. If all of those got banned, we'd move elsewhere. That might be a good thing. But we sure wouldn't move to G+.

Isn't FB pretty lenient when it comes to disabling people's accounts for such reasons?

Because facebook had years to fine tune this process. I don't think they had one kill-all switch that they pressed one morning after writing the fake name algo. It really helped that facebook grew in a very carefully plan Ed manner. On the otherhand, google plus' growth is kind of random from a geographic point of view. Why is this relevant? A lot of fake name confusion arises from lack of knowledge of names from another region. For facebook, they could soften specific criterias that would typically denote a bad name if the name ends up being a legit one in Thailand and there was a recent spike in Thai signups. G+'s lack of planned growth really hurts them, this being just one instance.

"but you're also super freakin' creepy"

There is nothing creepy about being anonymous on the Internet. It was the default mode since the time when one user couldn't keep track of all the Internet users in his head.

Until now I have always been anonymous unless I specifically chose otherwise. That's not creepy, it's normal.

You are clearly from internet of 90s :)

Unfortunately current trend is against pseudonyms. Lately I'm often encountering people who are genuinely surprised that I don't use my legal name.

Actually before the 90s.

The funny thing is, none of this would have been an issue if their initial real-name enforcement had been to temporarily suspend a profile, prompting users to change their name in order to turn them back on.

It's the lack of recourse that gets everyone up in arms more than the name policy

My rant, commented that over at G+ as well. Not sure if that counts as cross-posting, I'd love to hear some opinions here though:

People complaining about pseudonyms, with weird statements like 'Don't turn this into MySpace' or 'Leave those on Twitter': Are you serious? You are asking for a global policy, because you like to see full names? Chances are, your circles/contacts are already on the same page. No issues here, with or without the naming rule. IF some of your best friends would like to be 'PinkUnicorn' from today on, would you just cease reading his/her news? Do you really want to forcefully (go by your real name or leave the service) make them change? That's about the most egocentric thing I've ever heard or read. This is a social network - or tries to become one. You can choose with whom you are in contact, you can ignore people. But you cannot make people behave according to your own preferences.

You sound like someone that complains from his front lawn that everyone should wear ties, to look more professional. If you would rule, ties would be a requirement to leave the house. No more unprofessional Jeans & T-Shirts on the street, right?

Stay over at LinkedIn please and stop debating about other peoples wishes and needs for their own frikkin' account. If you don't get the reasons: Fine, nobody's perfect. But in that case here's a newsflash: It's not about you. You want yourself to go by your real name: Works as intended and no one wants to take that right away from you. You have not the slightest right to ask Google to force your personal believe down everyone's throat, however.

tl;dr "we believe our naming policy was right, but the way we enforced it was wrong"

I found this a interesting comment, from Danny Sullivan - it's not always straightforward to define what a "common name" is:

"What are the best ways for people to prove their 'common name' status. Unless +50 Cent has a government ID with that name, it's pretty clear that Google made the sensible decision to let him use his stage name, which he's commonly known by, here rather than a legal name. But if you're not as well known as him, asking for things like government IDs to prove your 'common name' -- which you do allow -- seems difficult."

They may give on this in the end, but it still shows the problem of consolidating too much power in one place. I have no problem with FB disabling my account, because it's not a necessity. But if G+ decided it was OK to disable my Gmail because of a change in policy, or a rogue automated profile checker then that's an entirely different story.

read the post, if you are suspended on google+ due to a name issue, the rest of your account works fine.

In the post he says your Gmail will not be disabled if you used a fake name.

From the article:

(Of course there are other Google-wide policies (e.g. egregious spamming, illegal activity, etc) that do apply to all Google products, and violations of these policies could in fact lead to a Google-wide suspension.)

So don't post about your favorite torrents site that violates copyright law. Or if you're like me and live in Illinois, video tape a police officer because that violates wire tapping laws. Yes, I know I would be in violation of this policy if I sent an email from gmail about these things, but I'm guessing I'm more likely to get caught if it's on g+.

Keeping my gmail account active is worth far more to me than any potential benefits of google+ at this point.

In any event, the down votes on the grandparent were uncalled for.

Glad to know that gmail and other google products won't be lost if this happens to you. It's still a ludicrous policy, though; something I'd expect from microsoft of facebook. I'm not sure why google is so hell-bent on enforcing it.

They’re taking an opinionated stance on creating a community. That’s generally a good thing, and in order to provide what they believe is a better experience for the kinds of people who interact with each other based on a conventional “real” name, they are willing to forgo that portion of the market that want to use a handle for some or all of their online interaction.

As I tweeted, I have no use for “circles” if I can’t be “raganwald" to those people who know me through my writing and “Reg Braithwaite” to those people who know me face to face, but I have zero problem with choosing not to use Google+, so why should I have a problem with Google choosing not to cater to me?

i think ALL bhorowitz blog posts should start with rap lyrics.

I think this matter highlights the absurdity of being offended by issues discovered during beta-testing. I suppose it's beta testing for the masses so people start assuming it's the finished product.

Given history, it's going to be beta for a long time.

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