YouTube Pushing Users Switch To Real Names
jimyounkin.com
jimyounkin.com
When measured empirically, one study found that anonymous commenting from people without user accounts increases the ratio of good comments to poor quality ones. The reason is that so many more people comment. There's a certain fixed number of trolls and troublemakers who have a lot of free time and will go through whatever hoops are needed to set up an account with a registered name, which may or may not be their real one. Legitimate commenters though are not as motivated to jump through hoops and comply with demands they use a consistent, or real sounding name.
http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anonymous-comments-by-the-numb...
As far as people with video accounts on youtube who are contributing content and allowing for the business model, youtube has many cases of attractive women vloggers who are routinely stalked by unhinged fan/viewers. Do these vloggers benefit from a degree of anonymity, or the ability to use pen names? Yes. In addition to attractive women, there are also many aliased vloggers posting political opinions about police and military brutality, citizen journalists anonymously uploading video from protests, etc. Maintaining penname aliases on vlogger content accounts clearly allows these contributors to increase their own safety by making it more difficult to stalk and harass them in real life by not just trolls and dysfunctional people, but also from government agents intending to both silence them and do them harm.
You don't think there's a large group to which that applies?
Given how easy it is to turn online harassment into real-life harassment with a little internet research, I will not begrudge anyone their separate identities. Your "controversial" opinion could be as benign as "I don't owe my youtube stalkers any attention" before someone is subjected to threats have the potential to seriously affect their life.
I don't have a problem using my real name either (this handle is easily traceable to my full address, I believe), but I'm a white guy, moderately well off and my political opinions are the mainstream, etc. I enjoy a degree of safety and social support that I take for granted, but that's not a luxury available to many who also deserve to participate in internet communities and cultural life.
That Google (and others) are not only not accomodating them but going out of their way to make it harder for them to have an online presence is really surprising to me. I'd have thought Google "gets" it, and I don't see what they're gaining from moves like this.
There are plenty of people that I know on YouTube by their fake names. I have no idea what benefits I get from them using a real name.
One problem that YouTube needs to sort out is "replygirls"; another is the appalling quality of comments.
(A last one is the unfortunate placing of ads. I keep seeing an ad about being a father (and backing up photos?) - there's no way to tell youtube that you never want to see that ad again. I imagine that there are many people who find that ad unbearable because they have recently lost a child. I would be happy to rate ads, and for YouTube to give that data back to advertisers. I tend to watch the ads to pay for the content I'm using. I only skip if it's infuriating.)
Which apparently amazon has a trademark on anyway: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8...
And I must say, when I read in one of the screenshots "And if you change your mind, you can switch back to your username", I chuckled inside. Call me cynical, but I'd bet a lot that going back will stop being possible pretty soon.
I registered a new account on Youtube a couple days ago and was not even given the option to choose a username. They asked me for my first and last name and that was it.
They collide, especially with a common name. Somebody googles your name and it may be difficult to find the "real" you.
Also people are pretty bad at spelling, many peoples names are very hard to spell. Not to mention that many of them are going to use different character sets.
Besides, if your life revolves around your internet identity. Is that a less legitimate identity than your real name?
It may be more practical for parents to assign some sort of "default handle" to their children which is expected to be changed as the child gets older.
For government purposes, perhaps a unique ID that cannot be changed would work better?
I don't need every future employer forever more knowing that I commented on a controversial video that one time back in '12.
"People will be held accountable now!" is the slogan I keep hearing ringing in my head listening to the excuses put out by companies.
In the end, it is their service people are using and they can dictate the terms all they want. However, it also sets up a system where people will now expect websites across the web to want their true names.
In a sense, it will become common place and make people look weird for using nick names. At least, that's my opinion.
Fuck them for doing that.
Remember: Google's business is advertising, and you can sell far better/more expensive ads to "real identities". As far as business goes, real identities are most definitely a good thing. For google, that is.
For instance, with Google's music service. Once you upload a few albums Google shows albums you might like. This isn't done because I have my real name (I don't use it, personally, but have seen it in action) posted.
Same kind of thing goes with ads. They can track your IP(s) and go with that. If anything, it's a better system than using so called "real names" because people, I will bet, will use fake names.
The same type of system can be used with nick names. It's just tied to the user's profile.
Maybe I'm just getting it all wrong and not thinking right, but it really doesn't sit well with me.
I am sure many advertisers think they want real identities, certainly that would appear to make their jobs even easier as they can then pull property value reports and criminal records searches for random people who happen to visit their site. Just because someone thinks they want something doesn't mean it is more effective. For example, many companies are losing in the marketplace because they can't compete because they can't hire qualified workers because they think they want a long list of acronyms rather than someone who is intelligent and has a history of getting the job done.
Which is more valuable for serving ads that are valuable to advertisers? An anonymous user who you track with cookies and ip address (which gives general location) and have a profile of based on their interests and things they search for? Or someone who you have forced to give their real name, so they have switched to Tor and now every access they make comes from a different ip address, none of which appear connected and none which are related to their real geographical point of origin? Or how about the user that simply unplugs.
This is not just theoretical supposition. In the 1980s supermarkets started using shopper loyalty programs. The stores would raise prices of many products, then offer to sell it at the normal price charged by competitors if the customer agreed to use a card linked to their real name and address, confirmed by state ID cards. This card then was used to track all of their purchasing habits and behaviors and form models of the customers in an attempt to influence them with more targeted coupon offers and direct mail advertising. At the same time, WalMart chose NOT to do that at all, and instead charged lower prices with no tracking, but did instead do much more difficult data analysis of purchases by store and region and date in order to find larger trends of what to keep in stock. For example, before a hurricane in Florida people buy a lot of beer WalMart's algorithms figured out and so they analyze weather data and send trucks full of beer when Florida is about to get hit with a big storm. Which approach worked? The manipulative one where customers were identified, monitored and targeted personally, and punished with higher prices if they refused this? Or the alternative where a more intelligent analysis was done of data without lazily requiring actual real id?
Not like you had much of a choice. "Youtube accounts" have been dead for a few years now, you can't log into a pure youtube account you're required to convert it or link it to a google account. In fact, youtube doesn't even have its own login page anymore, it's accounts.google.com or bust.
So what is my surprise when I see "You have to enter your phone number to continue". After trying to bypass it a few times I just gave up and got a Lavabit account. I don't want to give you my phone number and I most certainly don't want to give you my real name, Google. What the hell.
As such this leaves me with hope that they at least understand that real-name-for-everything is not a good idea.
Speaking of nicknames though:
Being able to use a nickname as the main identification handle on twitter is one of the main reasons why I'm not using Google+. Finishing a talk or a discussion with a quick "hey - follow me on twitter: @pilif" is so much easier than "Please search me on Google+ under the name Philip Hofstetter".
The last name is very difficult to type and in addition there are still a ton of Philip Hofstetter's around for people to confuse me with.
By enforcing the unique nickname and allowing users to use them as handles (and in URLs), twitter makes it much easier for people to bridge the gap between the real and the virtual world to the point where I know many people by their twitter handle instead of their real names.
With Google+ I'd have to make people spell my long name ("how many t's again?") or to give them an absurdly long number as my ID - neither of which is at all appealing (or producing "conversions" - if you want to call acquiring followers that)
The closest thing is "I _cannot_ use my real name". Which I'd probably click if I'd ever be in that situation. But that's not the same thing.
This is a weapon that facebook lacks. Plus it helps get rid of the "internet fuckwads" but as the author said, it's certainly an uphill battle. I don't think we should view it a negative light though.
You won't be saying that when your future girlfriend googles your name and sees all the My Little Pony videos you've been watching.
Hahaha. No.
Take a single look at Facebook, and you'll be proven wrong. The amount of utter retardation people post under their real names is both astonishing and depressing.
I've seen the reaction of another community where the "overlords" had the brilliant idea to force real names for exactly this reason. It was, by at least two orders of magnitude, the biggest shitstorm in the history of World of Warcraft, and that's saying something.
(In all fairness, Blizzard realized what a gigantically fucking stupid idea that was and retracted the announcement pretty quickly.)
I hope that this will deal a decisive blow to Youtube as a platform. The monopoly it enjoys in its segment is unhealthy and needs to go away.
Basically, the nym wars debacle demonstrated (if nothing else) that if you demand people's real names, know what you're asking for, and be prepared to support the multitude of naming conventions that exist worldwide.
I deleted my Google+ account when they started playing the Facebook game, turning an interesting service into a ~personal~ thing.
From what I can tell from my usage and discussions among friends, YouTube really is declining in use, thanks to the overzealous media industry, blocking videos left and right. If you want to listen to a bit of German music you're advised to use a proxy outside of Germany itself for a while, to avoid getting the dreaded 'This video is not available in your country' message.
In short: G+ fell short for me personally and in my 'circles'. YouTube could never interest me much in terms of keeping an account, as a consumer (for what? Comments?).
I'm glad that I don't rely on these services (anymore). I'll rather stay with a pseudonym, vimeo and duckduckgo.
It will stop perhaps the very worst 5%
But the comments are so awful that skimming 5% is nothing.
Adam Buxton (who used to work with Joe Cornish) has a show about music videos in which he mocks youtube comments. It's pretty good.
Perhaps some would happily do that now, but what about in 10 years when they've grown up?
Failing that, the Herp Derp YouTube Comments browser extension is easily the best plugin I have installed.
This is almost certainly not the case. If nasty comments were problematic Google could ban badly behaving users or take other measures. Accountability and identity are not the same thing, Google is pushing for identifying you not making you more accountable. Google has other motives likely related to building more accurate profiles for advertising and building out Google+.
When you opt out of using your real name they ask you what the reason is and I think based on the feedback they get from that little survey they might extend the functionality to include multiple names in some way shape or form. (at least I hope). Google+ already has some of this ability with the brand pages so hopefully they carry that over into into YouTube.
I posted a short reaction at http://youtu.be/Imhqt1vr3T8 Hopefully their search engine will pick it up.
I dislike giving incorrect answers to questions. I did use that box when testing the new requirements for lack of a better fit. By so doing, I am allowing Youtube (Google) to misrepresent my reasons for declining to use my real name. I don't care for that.
As I said in my video response, Youtube (Google) can either acknowledge my desire for a certain level of anonymity when I interact with youtube, or I simply will move to Vimeo or another provider.
Like a lot of people, I'm kind of stuck on the gmail tar baby. It will be hard for me to step away from gmail. Youtube, on the other hand, is not something where I have built up a lot of utility. It could be that they simply have decided that Youtube will now focus on the 'professional' posters, and not worry so much about casual posters and users like myself. I believe that is a mistake because the people that make a buck (or think they might) on youtube start as casual users.
I have noticed that youtube seems to be paying a lot more attention to the commercial users than to the casual users. That is their choice, but I'd bet that there will be other folks that would be only too happy to focus on the hoi pilloy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_polloi)
It almost seems like they are preparing YouTube for some TV displacement role they hope it will play in the future. It's not just funny cat videos anymore.. you can watch live concerts, rent movies, watch lectures or even broadcast your own content live via hangouts. I'm not sure where the real name initiative fits into here, though.
It made me realise that in all my many online identities, 51 at last count, I use my real name in exactly one online service provider (excluding banks) - a non-Google email service for "In Real Life" communication.
Just now, I changed this service profile to safeguard against the consequences of future copycat Google+ -like forced changes.
Thanks for the heads-up, HN'ers!