Nonplussed
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I have a feeling the market forces forcing Google, Facebook, et al into an arms race after your privacy and personal life will motivate people to leave more and more in favor of small players that do one thing well.
I expect people here will see the writing on the wall first that the sooner you get out the better. Yes, social networks have benefits, but they have costs too.
Deleting Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc accounts improves your life. Deleting them earlier improves your life earlier.
All Google had to do was go under the Facebook tree, and pick up dropped users off the ground. It really didn't need to go climbing up the tree to pick them off the branches.
As they're climbing the ladder, their own users are falling out of the baskets.
Corny analogy aside, they're not even doing a good job integrating mail, youtube, google, google+. I can't count the number of times I meant to click "Settings" for youtube, and ended up going to either Google+ or Google setting.
If they'd just backed off in the nymwars, WE'D ALL BE OVER THERE NOW. Fucksakes.
I truly believe they are opening a gap that others could exploit. Microsoft, so late to this party, with their userbase and technical know-how, with a lot of their ill deeds from the past forgotten or forgiven. If they decided that they are going to do it right, and not try to exploit users, they could become a threat again. I wonder if they are capable of this anymore though.
Or, reddit, with their substantial userbase of young, technically advanced, and influential users - if they could figure out the scalability issues, they could launch a youtube competitor, for example, and LOTS of people would move there very quickly, even if it is not as good, because they are (so far) known to be pure, whereas google has now proven that is is not pure, and dishonest (do no evil).
It's certainly not easy, but my point is, it's a lot easier when influential and vocal technical users have turned on you, and the degree to which they've turned.
The sort of political and organizing power reddit has shown recently (say, with the SOPA campaign) is not thinkable on facebook or google+. An AMA on reddit has also become a required stop for actors/directors/authors etc. for promoting their latest projects. G+ can only dream of such reach and power and facebook is by design (and branding) not suitable for such "interactive-broadcasting" type of usage.
now, if you want to start to discuss effectivenes instead of size, take a look at slashcode voting system.
The tone of reddit is set more by downvoting rather than upvoting. Any post on proggit about any language people actually use gets voted down by an army of bots written in languages that people don't use. Also, they're a bunch of communists because they'll vote you down if you drop any hint that (1) you're in it for the money or (2) you care about business in any way.
Reddit's negativity might make it spam resistant, but it will repell mainstream audiences and prevent their expansion.
Yep, Yahoo! has a lot of chances of screwing it up, but it's also the largest online pseudonymous social network I can think of.
In Firefox, if you have DDG as your default search:
ctrl-k (next thing you type will be a search)
!g (A DDG "bang code," in this case "search google")
whatever (this search will be sent to google)
DDG gets better and better every day. I noticed recently that if you search for a street address DDG gives you a map result from open street map, and gives you links to bing, mapquest, google maps and open street map. It's great.
And btw the DDG bang code for google maps is "!gm" and the bang code for google news is "!gn".
Well, that and it was a pretty vacuous experience.
<cough> AOL <cough> <cough>
EDIT: Here is an example: https://siracusa.cupcake.is/profile.
Still, people like stranger-to-stranger social media as well, like with Instagram. I suppose that functionality will always lie with a third party, since no privacy can be assumed in that case.
One way to publish it would be to have your front-end platform act as a subscriber to posts with some type of "published" flag. This sort of paradigm would be amenable to having multiple aggregators acting as the front-ends for syndicating content.
Comments on your posts would themselves be Tent posts, created by readers and hosted in their own Tents. Readers could have some of their conversations on your content publicly, but could also @-mention other users by Tent Entity URL to have private conversations within their social groups.
I really think the sky is the limit, because the system puts the data in the users' wheelhouses, and there can be all sorts of innovation in presentation and interactivity, decoupled with many of the concerns about storage.
Platforms could still monetize post content that they create and mediate, it's just that users would be able to choose the platforms that serve them best, rewarding those providers.
I think there's probably a lot of stuff to figure out still, but I'm very excited to see where this goes.
the only alternative model is decentralized, encrypted and pseudonymous/anonymous. Maybe something along the lines of btsync, btchat mixed with pursuit [1].
I would go on a tangent to this, that I never got any actionable information or other life improvement from facebook. I tried, really hard, for six months, to participate and get something out of it, but it was just a huge time waster so I wiped it.
Although supposedly youtube is only (or mostly) used for trash talking comments on kitten videos, I have occasionally gotten actual useful data and experiences from youtube. Programming screencasts and the like. Also the videos I watch and comment on are of a professional-ish level I like being associated with.
So I'm finding the outrage hard to generate. If the whole world finds out my real name liked a university video lecture about simulating a vibrating 2-D plane using multiple stack computers solving differential eqs instantiated on a FPGA as a lab exercise at Columbia, well, I'm not going to ragequit youtube over it. In fact I think thats just great.
Its their property; if they want to drastically change its culture (to something I happen to prefer) its hard for me to feel bad about it. There was a cheesy falling apart barn nearby the Interstate not too far from where I live. The new owners painted it; outrage from traditionalists who would rather see it torn down than painted. What do I care, other than I happen to like the new paint job? If the complainers don't like it, they can put up their own antique barn and let it decay unpainted, or they could have bought the old barn.
The original author didn't like that the rabbit bathing video site decided to dump him, so shout out, you can't dump me because I'm dumping you first. Well all this high school dating drama is amusing for me to watch, but I have a FPGA video to get back to watching. And if someone finds out, that's OK with me.
Unlike facebook, youtube can demand a fair trade because its content is actually worth something. OK here's my real name, now let me watch something useful.
This might be the end of youtube as we know it, as a complete waste of time, I mean. It doesn't mean the end of the site.
Eh, I think this idea that we must live our whole life in public (to the /same/ public using the /same/ identity) is a bit insidious. Especially in these days of "cultural fit" - it leads to this idea that you need to spend your private life in service of your professional life.
If you have an unpopular hobby or sexual proclivity, keeping that out of your professional life, in many circles, could be even seen as polite; At the office? nobody wants to know about your love for furry fan-fiction.
Sure, cute cat videos are different from furry fan fiction, but... if I'm "following" you? I will "unfollow" if there are a bunch of cute cat videos. I mean, unless I'm following you for your great taste in cute cat videos. More to the point, if I'm evaluating you and, say, your long screeds advocating a political cause I find particularly distasteful keep coming up, I might have a hard time evaluating you rationally, on your skills. (Also, if I'm hiring you, I want you to be able to leave the bullshit at home. Leaving the bullshit in another identity helps with that sort of thing.)
I really think that multiple identities is the solution. You can have your cute cat picture identity, your furry fan-fiction identity, your radical socialist identity, and your professional programmer identity. I can choose to follow the identity I find interesting. I mean, yeah, if someone /really wants/ to connect your furry fan-fiction identity to your professional programmer identity, they can. However, if you practice proper identity hygiene, it becomes much easier for me (or another third party) to interact with the professional programmer, without dealing with your hobbies I have no interest in, or maybe even find distasteful.
Most of the "real name" folks seem to think that by making everything public, we will see that we are all weirdos, and become more accepting of our differences.
I guess that's my prime problem with the 'real name' folks; I think that it's just fine to do business with, or even relate socially to folks that have hobbies or political views that I believe are downright wrong. I don't think that 'acceptance' is required for that. I think that you can like and trust one facet of a person's personality, without liking other facets of their personality.
I want to be able to say "I think this person is a great programmer" without implying that I also endorse their badly written Spock/Kirk slash fiction, or their half-baked anarcho-capitalist political rants.
My point is that I may have 'cat video friends' who, you know, are in to that sort of thing, with whom I may wish to share these sorts of things.
My point is that while it's fine to have my cat video friends, I ought to have the option of not sharing my 'cat fancy' with other groups who may look down on that sort of thing.
Personally I'm a big fan of encouraging the use of real identities for reputation management in online communities instead of relying on fake Internet points. We'll have to wait and see how it all shakes down!
For me personally? I use my real name for most things. It's convenient. And in a "cultural fit" world, well, I am a "cultural fit" for my profession, so why not run with it? Nearly everything I've done online in the last decade has been under my real name.
That's the key, though. Being a 'cultural fit' means that the community is unlikely to have a problem with my personal life, and if they do, it's likely to be a minor sort of thing.
Edit: forgot to mention, you have to explicitly connect the G+ Page to YouTube.
But there are lots of ways to share YouTube videos, forwarding a URL being one that does not even require any YouTube account or bookmarking for yourself to load it up later.
I'm learning a few instruments, and I find a lot of instructors use youtube for that. (Although I'm finding I prefer instructors' vimeo videos when they do it that way.) Some of them are very good. As long as youtube lets me view without logging in, I'm happy. I'll react in some rational way if they change that.
Then there are the video you can't watch from third party websites and from certain regions and so on.
It is an improbable possibility that google will require to be logged in to watch youtube videos, but it's still could happen one day.
Again with the "it's their right to do whatever they want with it, so you can't complain". First of all it's perfectly fair for people to complain or criticize a service. Especially if they use it a lot or depend on it. It's certainly frustrating to use a website for years and be forced to leave it or deal with the changes.
Second YouTube is basically a monopoly. There are not many other video sharing sites, especially with lots of viewers, to post videos on. And for viewers almost all the videos on the internet are hosted on YouTube and most content creators. It's not like we have much of a choice to just go somewhere else if we don't like it.
At one point, the comments were probably really useful to YouTube. They probably increase the virality of the content, before Facebook and Twitter provided new ways to share. But now, it's a liability. Advertisers don't want their product to be juxtaposed with unaccountable commentary, and advertisers are the ones that finance the whole enterprise, for better or for worse.
I'm really glad Google finally decided to do something about their video comments. They host some of the vilest commentary I've seen on any mainstream site.
I'm not aware of advertisers ever caring about comments and if so that's absolutely ridiculous. Keep in mind they also allow anyone to post videos of anything at all short of porn and place adverts right over that. Plenty of forum sites have ads as well. I really doubt that was ever an issue and it's incredibly silly if it was.
Fixing the comments doesn't require removing anonymity or even censorship.
The problem with youtube comments is that it was a huge mainstream site open to everyone. Unlike niche communities that filter out certain kinds of people just because they don't go to the site. Second there was no sorting of comments at all. Anything anyone posted immediately appeared at the top. Like and dislike buttons had no functional use, they were a joke.
And the comments still suck and they always will.
But the racist idiot posting the most vile and offensive stuff you have ever read is going to sick around because he enjoys doing that.
It sort of sounds like another one of those "I'm 22 and don't understand why other people can't just be true to themselves and don't want their real name associated with every single thing they've ever said or done" rants against old people, but I wouldn't slap that accusation on you.
I think people just want to say things sometimes without it hanging around forever. Like yelling out something funny in a crowd. What's wrong with that?
Sorry for responding late. TLDR of my long post is its a privacy market. The trade happens when both sides think they're getting the better half of the deal at the same time. FB is a classic privacy market which I got almost nothing from, so I'm not willing to trade more than a microscopic amount of privacy for it, in fact I'm not willing to participate at all. On the other hand, I feel I get substantial "stuff" in exchange for giving up some privacy on youtube, there actually is some worthwhile stuff there, so I feel its a fair trade. This market making balance varies pretty widely across different people at different sites. I could have just as well used HN as my example of trading off privacy (however little) vs what I get out of it (which is a lot) but FB is the standard market player for privacy discussions, so...
On the bigger picture, I suspect those who run YT know what they're doing, and this is a reasoned decision. You must give up this much more privacy to trade, means they are hoping / expecting the value of whatever videos they're shipping will improve to make it worthwhile. Or they just can't monetize anonymous cute cat video comments anymore so abandon that market sector, which is frankly not much of a loss to humanity.
I think you are oversimplifying the pros/cons of social media. Facebook and LinkedIn are incredibly useful as networking tools if nothing else. I can maintain a network of people in many different cities and countries and keep up on family/friend developments without talking on the phone for hours. Plus it makes sharing things like articles, photos, and videos much easier. The list goes on and on...
As for privacy? Well, celebrities live with the absence of privacy as a requisite of becoming famous. We enjoy a free service with the implicit agreement that we are giving something of ourselves in exchange--our eyeballs and personal data for ads. It's up to you to make that choice, but you can't whine when you enjoyed a free service for so long.
Then being hired to uncover people's identity from their online activity in times before so called "social networks" were coined led me to never register on friendster, myspace or any other followers of this trend. I failed to see the benefits of linkedin which still spams on a regular basis (if anyone knows how to stop receiving emails from linkedin...) and saw where facebook was headed in their attempt to be the new msn which for those who remember was microsoft attempt to destroy the internet by replacing it with a microsoft owned network which came bundled with windows 95.
I value freedom, therefore privacy, I refuse to be the product being sold and hate with a passion anything ads-based for I have experienced the web before ads which is the vector from which privacy invasion and surveillance came to be.
For some reason people started to offer money to display ads banner on websites but asked for at least a way to count and track clicks on those banners and It's been all downhill from there. For those who read TAZ by Hakim Bey he put the end of the potential of the web to put the people in power around 1996 when ads came to the web and turned it into a surveillance tool.
As part of the rare breed of people actually using Google+ proper, it's really turned me off from the whole thing. Even though I shared YouTube videos publicly and commented on publicly-viewable Google+ posts with YouTube videos, I intended to only post my comments and shares on Google+, not syndicated everywhere at a later date without additional consent[1] and especially not the cesspool that is the YouTube comment section. I don't really understand why anyone thought that'd be okay. And anecdote isn't data, but talking to other Google+ users I know, nobody seemed to be aware that this was going to happen: they all just thought the identities would be merged, but if you post on Google+, it'd stay on Google+.
[1]: I'm aware that there's probably some clause in their privacy policy that gave them the legal ability to do this, but Google is usually pretty decent when it comes to informing of changes to privacy/visibility options.
When I was freelancing, I emailed back and forth with potential clients through the Gmail interface. One day I saw this party pic of a 20-something girl with beer in hand, identified by the full name of a receptionist I had emailed with professionally but never actually met. It was a suggestion from Google to connect with her on Google+, which I'm sure she'd have been mortified by. I deleted my account that day.
There are so many mundane variations on that theme, and then there are very serious ones: those seeking support for addiction, as survivors of abuse, or other situations that have social stigma or personal risk attached to them. Some needs are simply private in that way a vulnerable person needs secure anonymity lest the public light itself become a chilling effect, of which health concerns are a common example.
The architecture of Google+ is such that it is inherently inhuman in its disregard for privacy and for applying different "pen names" to the various situations of life.
They may not acknowledge it, but they certainly understand it. The whole value proposition of Circles was initially that'd you'd only share what you want with who you want.
Then Google changed directions entirely (along with the big management shakeup that flipped Google from a bottom-up org to a top-down org) and those ideas were effectively killed. And every single person I knew who'd been toying with G+ dropped it like a hot potato.
I just went to the YouTube comment box, and right there is the control for what circles to publish to: http://imgur.com/3ZEB9Th
Personally I much prefer that G+ (and Facebook, for that matter) lets you interact with real people and not personas.
I just try to explain why Google+ does not work for me at all.
I think Facebook's recommendation system was using the data from other users' address books. As in I'd get a list of various people that I'd done business with in the past as suggested friends on Facebook. Those people had my address in their address book and I can only assume they'd uploaded their contacts to Facebook. Facebook retains that data. Here I am a new user. Wow how does it know I know such and such? I can only assume that it also works the other way: I join and I pop up in their account.
Google got into a mess with Buzz and the address book leaks, and email address leaks.
So there's a fine line here between privacy and helpfulness.
I don't care if it's perfectly legitimate and understandable behaviour, it's awkward.
The Youtube comments used to just be weird as comments would refer to other comments, and then they'd get promoted and end up completely disjointed. At least now there is threading.
If you'd re-shared someone elses video share, you're SOL. I deleted a few of those posts, re-posted others as URL links to the original (this loses comments, if any).
It used to be you could identify your YT comments from within YT. I've got slightly separated accounts on G+ and YT, and the comments originating from G+ don't seem to show under the YT account. I'm not sure there's any clean way to get rid of them.
I pretty much share your view of where my comments get posted -- I place them in a context, and that's where I intend for them to remain. The YT thing was (yet another) huge trust violation. Especially given that comment management tools are so pissedly poor on G+.
Put another way, imagine I am a teenager or college student who uses Facebook.
1. Start to upload a photo from my phone of me and my friends doing shots
2. Try to figure out how (on my phone!) to set privacy settings so that my younger brother (who is my Facebook friend) and my parents (who aren't, but use the Internet and sometimes Google my name) can't see it.
3. Remember that Facebook has a history of "expanding" privacy settings retroactively
4. Think "Ah, fuck it", and send a Snapchat to my friends instead.
In reality it's probably not that common right now, but hopefully that may increase in the future. You can only pull the rug out from under your users so many times before learn to walk along another path.
To do otherwise would be corporate suicide.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on G+.
I know that, which is why I used the example of Facebook.
However, Google+ does make it incredibly easy to leak information that I would otherwise consider private accidentally.
For example, I can't use Google+ with my primary email address, as it's a Google+ account. However, because it's linked with my Gmail account (which does have a Google+ account), some people who have added me on Google+ have been able to figure out my Gmail address (which I haven't used for email purposes in years[0]).
I can imagine all the technical reasons for this, but that doesn't change the fact that it feels a bit wrong for a service to hand out my old email address (which I never give out anymore) to people I've met recently and who have added me on Google+ using my current email address.
Imagine your Google+ email address is something that you can't change, but don't really want people to see anymore - this isn't uncommon; it appeared in a New York Times piece just yesterday, in the context of college admissions[1]. Thankfully, my personal email address is much more tame than that student's, but that still doesn't mean I want anybody to know or use it nowadays.
Furthermore, it's incredibly easy to sign up "accidentally" to use Youtube with Google+ and your "real name" instead of continuing to use your pseudonym.
As for the distinction you point out - I know the difference, and you know the difference. But most users don't.
> To do otherwise would be corporate suicide.
Apparently not completely - Facebook's gotten away with it for years![2]
[0] This may have been fixed, since it was a while ago that I last noticed, but it was still the case for quite a while.
I would have to go through my inbox to remember the details of why this happened - I remember debugging and tracking it down. But the fact that it took that much effort to discover why my new acquaintances suddenly knew my old (personal) email address, and that I can't remember anymore, speaks volumes as to how easy it would be for a less savvy user to accidentally leak information that they wanted to keep private.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved-your-g...
[2] http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ - this graph doesn't distinguish clearly between those which were automatically retroactive and those which weren't, but that's a topic that's been well-reported and is easy to search for.
Personally I do feel that G+ has done a good job at communicating to users the privacy they do and don't have, as the ACLs were baked in at the beginning. I think users have had the possibility to be confused when data is being used outside the http://plus.google.com domain, like Shared Endorsements and the YouTube comments, as this opens up the worry ACLs are being violated. I think there's more work that can be done to communicate that this hasn't happened, such as putting the "Shared (publicly|privately)" on YouTube comments so you can see why those are there.
Thanks for the offer - I really appreciate it. I think it had something to do with group contacts in Gmail, but I can't remember. If I have some time today I might take a look.
To clarify: I'm not exactly mad at Google in this case, because I'm a developer and I know how tricky it can be to get these things right even in small, standalone products[0]. And unlike some people on HackerNews, I don't think this is a result of bad intentions. It's just that, every time I see something like this happen (beagle3 points out the example of Buzz below), I can't help but notice that users' trust is both fragile (easily broken) and unforgiving (no benefit of the doubt).
These things are tough to get right, but they're very critical for the long-term success of a product.
[0] Also, the consequences for me happened to be pretty mild, thankfully.
It's one thing to do this if you're a new service, with users that don't have all kinds of baggage with you - if your UI isn't great they can choose to accept it for the value you offer or reject it. But existing users it's almost a kind of fraud - you convince em to join under a false pretense but then change the rules half way.
Just don't do this. Seriously. Don't do it. I don't know why people keep putting self-damaging things on the Internet. If it's on the Internet, you should consider it as public. Full stop. There's so many avenues for things to get out into the public (leaked passwords, website glitches, human error in general), that unless you're extremely careful about the dissemination of that information (hint: don't be /in/ the picture in the first place, or you've already lost), the data is as good as public.
Really, what did you gain by putting that picture on the Internet, anyway?
It is a memory. Doing shots isn't wrong or bad. Maybe doing 20 of them and then driving home from the bar is bad. Posting pictures is a way to relive a precious moment in time with others.
what about this: someone is being odiously racist, so I write a brutal reply to shut em down. Should I also hesitate on doing this, thinking that some employer may infer my radical left politics from it and stop me from getting a job in the future?
All you need to know about common sense about what to upload online is that it changes, not only in time but from social scene to social scene.
This is totally it for me. I have a few Google accounts (an 'original' one and two Apps For Your Domain ones for e-mail and work) and it seems Google has made Plus accounts for each and I have things spread around them all. I've seen stories where people tried to "merge" accounts and ended up losing access to their mail, etc.. so rocking the boat doesn't seem worth it to me.
I don't mind Google's (usually great) services but it's the binding together that makes me wary.
Is it a pride of ego fallacy? They think they are the best and they can do no wrong, so they just keep doing things without thinking results through?
Too many logical programmers trying to have input on end users/UI/UX decisions where visuals and emotions are more important?
Too many 24 year old bro managers running around trying to make a name for themselves by manipulating people in flashy ways instead of quietly making the world a better place?
"Which post? Oh, post 43278947329849783223? Yeah, I liked that one too."
See also, the decline of GNOME. This isn't a problem unique to Google.
Now that they're trying to program humans ... not so great.
Original link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/20/sex_a...
The only explanation as to why they are continuing to push forward on this front even in the face of increasing criticism is that it must be working, at least in the sense that the number keeps going up. However, these UX nightmares are eventually going to catch up with them and drive people away. In short, they are going to win the battle but lose the war.
I can't believe this is their final solution.
I can't even favourite nor like a video on YouTube anymore without being subjected to the whole carrousel of signing up for G+. I get the impression that there's some asshole at companies like Google creating a Markov chain for bumping head-first into a registration wall for the most inane lurker actions.
And this is not to mention the absolutely awful situation of being locked out of my own list of favourites, because I am now required to sign up for G+ to export them.
Don't you love the Silicon Valley CEOs who say they want to index the world's information and allow everyone to share it - except this is becoming increasingly impossible on their own platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Quora.
I get that companies have to make money, but I think the companies' business models are perfectly aligned with their personal philosophies.
But you can bookmark. Or does that not make sense on a phone? My galaxy has been in my sock drawer for a couple years now, I forget.
I have no permanent way to disable Youtube asking me to merge accounts except goat sacrifice and writing directly to Larry Page - "If I rejected you 25 time why do you think I will agree on the 26th"
I had to use Google Maps yesterday - the mobile app. Few things of notice - scale was never given on screen. Also there was not a way by which you could measure the distance between two points.
There are numerous inconsistencies between their products - why is google keep hidden when you are at drive google.com and on and on and on.
I think that this could be case of either no dogfooding or extreme dogfooding - either no one at google uses their own services or they use only google ones and have forgotten that people in the outside world are not so invested in the google ecosystem.
(N.b. this is on iOS, I think Android maps has a scale?)
Perhaps, just perhaps, they've decided they will make more money by forcing people to use G+. I see plenty of comments on YouTube, still of YT quality, with "Real Names". It's not like there's really a useful alternative to YT for most people. Google gets nothing from people commenting anonymously on YT. Annoying those people is no big loss - they won't stop visiting YT to consume. And for those that sign up with G+, they'll eventually gain more money from advertising.
This whole attitude that this is sheer UX incompetence is moronic.
(Now, with respect to the whole accounts management stuff and Google Apps and what not, that seems like technical issues.)
The one message I keep hearing from people launching new youtube channels is "please comment". And as it happens, the comments on less popular videos tend to be of a higher caliber, too.
If Google drives away commenters from fringe videos, they will absolutely feel the loss down the line.
If people start leaving for an alternative service, then they might care. And who could launch an alternative? Yahoo? Microsoft? MS tried and bungled it like crazy (like everything MSN.)
I went through this exact process and thought ("screw this, ugh!") several times before I just decided to stop hanging out on youtube and commenting on peoples' videos. I used to waste a huge amount of time doing this, but now I only sometimes watch things that others have discovered and shared with me. I don't comment or browse like I used to, and I'm sure their advertising revenue off of me has dropped off a cliff.
It also seems like the amount of intrusive/unskippable advertising has rocketed up, too, over the last couple of years while they were forcing G+ on the world. They're kidding themselves if they think I'm going to happily watch a 30 second ad before a 2 minute viral video.
I was annoyed/sad at first when they started making these changes, but now I realize I was mostly wasting my time doing that stuff anyway. So thanks, Google, for making your site less fun to use; it really has saved me a lot of time.
Sadly I haven't figured out a solution for mobile platforms yet. I just don't watch videos with ads in them on mobile.
Deleting the account seems to have had no ill effects. The deletion page did warn me that "third party sign on" would stop working, and I do use the Google third party login via OAuth because some sites rely on it, but nothing broke. Is there some kind of different "login with G+"?
I also moved calendaring and reminders to Fruux [1], and I have previously moved my email and contacts to Fastmail, and my notes to Evernote. I'm still on GTalk via Adium, though -- is there a good replacement for that?
Moving away from the big provides feels good. It feels liberating, in fact. Google and Apple provide whole ecosystems of services, and they really, really want you to buy into their whole integrated system, and they design their systems to stretch their tendrils as far into your computing experience as possible.
At least with Apple that's core to their long-established philosophy -- integrated devices that just work -- but I'm a big believer in decentralization. I want to pick the best possible system that integrates with everything using open standards.
However, forcing Google+ onto people does have me wary as well. I don't mind using Google+, but it seems like Google's way to slowly worm their way into people using its social component. I admittedly am not sure why it affects me, but something about that does rub me the wrong way (although not enough to ditch using Google services). It's not quite insidious, but it does feel like it gives off the vibe that we are the product, even more than usual.
Using real names does not fix the problem completely, I agree - you easily see the effect on articles on politics on news sites, with the mass shill accounts.
However, I argue that it is a lot greater of a deterrent.
Anonymous Youtube comments suck, but anonymity enables people to express unpopular opinions. The real problem is tyranny of the majority. Attaching real names does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.
Google should be smart enough to build a proper moderation system and retain anonymity.
It is my opinion that that is a worse reality should it be the norm, and wish there was more pushback. I have developed communities that try to show a better way by example (& that preserve anonymity), but that route requires active moderation, something that would be too time consuming/costly for Google to do IMO (and would likely be subject to backlash from a more anarchist contingent anyway).
In the end, I work with the dynamic that exists in the internet to set a positive example - if people want to abuse anonymity, they are more than welcome to create their own communities that make that acceptable. I will just continue to work in my own circles to provide environments that allow free exchange of ideas with civility, and everyone co-exists merrily.
Tyranny of the minority, you mean. 50%+ of internet users are not racist trolls, for example. I suspect 50%+ of anonymous commenters are, at least in mass market sites without any Karma type system... like youtube.
I'm not seeing the problem in realigning global traffic such that 4chan and reddit get more troll traffic and youtube gets less.
Up the number of characters you can have in a comment then and put some proper thread organisation in place. Regardless of what they hook it up to, there are limits to the depth of the conversations you can have in such a restrictive structure.
If you lack such tools, it seems to me that the only things people are liable to post if you take the length restriction off is the full text of books to try and crash the browser, ASCII art of male genitalia, and links to some of the more ewww corners of the internet. In the time it takes someone to post something well thought out someone can post twenty ASCII penises after all. The low-effort to high-lols expressions seem likely to dominate over the high-effort high-meaning expressions.
Sort of like how Reddit decayed, but with a somewhat darker tone since the existing community in the comments is less well developed than they started off with, there'd be even fewer tools, less effective moderation and you won't be able to hide niche communities behind unknown lookup names as well.
https://plus.google.com/downgrade/
To remove your Google+ account from YouTube:
Go to youtube settings: http://www.youtube.com/account
Click "Return name to <name>, and disconnect Google+ profile"
I was an early adopter to Google+ but screw it, I'm sick of dealing with this crap.
As for something "altogether different". I don't see it happening. There are just too many powerful vested interest at work. e.g. We can't even get a HTML standard pushed through without DRM.
This might sound cynical, but personally I feel its the end of an era. The internet used to be the wild west where anything is possible. Now its become a commercial turkey shoot via dark patterns, micro-transactions, data mining and a dozen other buzzwords.
The "internet," i.e. TCP/IP, is still there pretty much as it always was. Google's interface is almost all web on top of the internet, Facebook too.
Anyone is free to use anything else implemented on the internet. Fastmail makes a handy living at implementing smtp and imap on top of TCP/IP; their value is excellent implementation along with service.
It's always possible to sell good service.
You don't have to use the DRM parts.
And I agree, it is the end of an era, a really good era. But it's not the end.
That might be true to you & me, but to the masses the internet is google, facebook, twitter etc.
Yes you can build anything on it, but can you compete against an opponent that is bigger, more powerful, has networking effects on its side and is more willing to use questionable tactics? Service goes a long way, but it doesn't scale well and its not enough against those odds (imo).
>Anyone is free to use anything else implemented on the internet.
Are they? Its not really about what you are free to use, but more about what you can skip. See the author in the article...does he sound like he is free to not use G+? Plus there are powerful networking effects at play...I never wanted a FB account but my friends kept bugging me about it. In a practical scenario users have very little freedom to do what they want & it only gets worse if they're technically illiterate.
The whole point of app.net was to create a social-network-type thing that served its users, because they were the ones paying for it. But it seems that most people prefer free stuff to non-evil.
Hey, at least I'll get to use a DVCS. :P
In all honesty, though, while this won't hurt Google right now, it's going to come back and bite them in the rear end soon enough. If they keep making these kinds of changes, what's next? Having to sign in to Google+ to use Android? A Google+ feed on the Chrome OS deskop? Requirements for Google+ account with "Developer Privileges" to download Go?
Again, this doesn't matter much now, but it's going to hurt them later. It happens to the best of everyone: Microsoft. Apple. Google.
Github's issue tracker is terrible (try to prioritise things) while GC is a lot better.
The one thing GC does really well is they let you have multiple repositories per project. This means you can have an Android repository, a server repository, a web site repository etc and they can all be on the same page using the same issue tracker, wiki etc. I've asked Github to implement this but they aren't interested. When each repo has its own wiki, issue tracker, releases etc it is far too painful (eg you can't move tickets between projects).
That also helps for documentation. My projects have extensive generated documentation. With github you have to dump that into a branch, and put generated content into a source code control system is not a good idea. With GC you can just created another repository and put the generated doc there.
I personally prefer Mercurial over git, but that isn't a realistic choice with github.
On the whole, while GC has some nice things, I doubt it has much of a future. I wish github would pick up the multiple repositories thing.
For my personal projects a common pattern is a repo for the source and a repo for generated documentation.
For work projects we have an Android client (in Java), iOS client (in objective C), 3 different server components that share no code (Python), various analysis tools (Python), a client customisation layer (mini-Python), our website etc.
If all those were in one large repository it would be a huge sprawling mess. Also remember that branches are repository global. There would also be constant updates because other parts have changed, nothing to do with the component you are working on.
Now, whether it's a good decision to make it difficult/impossible to anonymously comment on youtube videos is an entirely separate discussion that I'm not taking a side on (yet), but I'd be interested in seeing a discussion about that here.
It's when they parade out the idea that "real names = better quality" as the reason for a change - without citing it. Especially since it's such a cross-product change that effects literally every single one of their products.
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/epop2013/docs/Rowe_Ci...
“Many revolutions start with one small spark, President Obama has set this one off with his presser with the children and his use of the executive orders. The question is, is this the revolution that he had in mind? Time will tell.”
These are examples of comments the authors count as uncivil. They advocate for using real names so that people will not (dare?) post such things. I am of the contrary opinion. I think it is important that such opinions are posted and debated.
The criteria they used: "A three item index was developed to determine whether or not online comments violated standards of democratic discourse as defined above. If a comment 1) verbalized a threat to democracy (e.g. proposed to overthrow a democratic government by force), 2) assigned stereotypes (e.g. associate person with a group using labels), or 3) threatened other individuals’ rights (e.g. personal freedom, freedom to speak), it was coded as uncivil and the type of incivility was noted."
They also, separately studied impoliteness, which I assume we can all be in favour of.
Interestingly, they found civility increased, while impoliteness did not "However, unlike incivility, both [anonymous] Website and Facebook comments contained a similar amount of impoliteness."
Thus I would argue that the conclusion would be that using real names lowers the quality of debate.
The problem is that annoying the user doesn't really make them want to use it more. I thought G+ might've had potential at first, but seeing all the desperate crap that Google's pulled over the past few months has not only pushed me away from G+, but Google as a whole.
Besides, did anybody really care about the quality of youtube comments? Nobody ever read them with the expectation of gaining any sort of insight or knowledge. Even if this change does affect youtube comment quality, it won't change anybody's expectations of the comments. The only shift will be from "this video is totes retarded" to "this video is stupid."
Note that I'm specifically excluding sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that required real names from the start. I suspect it's a matter of whether users think of the site as being relevant to their personal identity. I'd even be willing to hypothesize that a random sample of Hacker News users considers HN more "real life" than a random sample of YouTube commenters who had g+ accounts crammed down their throats.
I think the entire point might have been to make user generated content as valuable as possible to advertisers by making sure every action on every Google related site can be directly linked to a real name and locale. I refuse to believe it has to do with anything beyond monetizing their user base.
[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/meaningless-miss...
But the only places I really post are here and Reddit. I email stuff to close friends and occasionally use Facebook when I'm invited to an event but that's about the limit of my use of social media.
In general - I'm quite happy to be logged into Google across all services. It makes Google Now slightly more useful and I can happily ignore all the parts of it that don't interest me.
And advertisers are welcome to profile me to their heart's content - they just don't seem to be very good at it. I've never clicked on a targeted ad so it's seems a lot of effort to no real effect.
Unfortunately, G+ still has a ton of issues that I find infuriating, and while I actively want to like G+, I find it hard to do so. That part frustrates me more than anything, when it comes to Google and their services.
Don't consider it if you're using Android, as some core apps will stop working then (like the photo-gallery).
Yup. It has come to this. Disable or delete your G+ account and your Android phone no longer works.
Google is getting pretty damn creepy. I sure hope the CM-team can come up with some decent replacement apps for all the stuff Google is fucking up these days.
Unrelated: http://i.imgur.com/wbjCmbt.jpg
Changing faces of Google is a scary phenomenon.
... yet.
I've even had a few people who accidentally signed up for a G+ account ask me how to delete it because they kept receiving 'Top X posts on G+' mails without knowing what it is. I don't think a lot of good things come with this kind of tactic.
http://www.change.org/petitions/google-change-the-youtube-co...
Stands at 80,445 supporters now.
I'm not going to comment on anything else in the article, this just struck me as odd and obviously contradictory.
Perhaps it's time to move on from Google Photos, flickr maybe? I don't want another social network.
Frankly I think that's the way to go. Ideally, we'd have better identity support in our browsers to control which set of cookies to hand out based on which top-level URL we're visiting.
Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_J0AMPPD34
Enough said. The dude is a typical Facebook user who is addicted to his only social network and upset about integration between YouTube and G+. Better commenting system and difficulty of creating fake user accounts will increase the quality of comments. I guess the people who complain like to troll or post some obnoxious comments, this explains the frustration.
Unfortunately at this stage I think you are completely wrong. I suspect that you don't use YouTube very much and so are not seeing what has happened. I'm sorry if this sounds snide, it isn't meant to.
YouTube had a reputation with some as providing the worst internet comments outside 4chan. I doubt few could imagine it getting worse. This recent Google+ integration seems to be an experiment on Google's part to prove how naive that belief was.
You can now post hyperlinks in comments. This has led to people spamming links to 'screamer' videos, including the potential to disguise these links as the comment expanding feature. Comments can now have seemingly unlimited length, or at least are massively extended compared to the previous system; This has led to people spamming ASCII art images of genitals, pedobear, naked women, memes like the super shibe 'doge', and reams and reams of repeating text like "#FUCKGOOGLE". Actual advertiser spammers are soon going to catch onto this ability, so the messages offering free copies of popular video games like Minecraft no longer have to come with the polite request to copypaste them into your address bar - they can just be clicked. This is just the tip of the iceberg in the first few days. I know I'm not alone in wondering how long it will be before someone finds a way to exploit these new comments as a vector for directly delivering malware. And even if the hyperlinks are removed, it has created a enormous new canvas on which trolls, children and idiots can paint their own brand of humour. There does not currently seem to be any way of blanket blocking URLs, instead needing a filter list set up with every potential combination of keywords and domains.
The kind of people who create and post this stuff are the kind of people least likely to care about creating multiple throwaway accounts or having this rubbish leak into other websites. Anecdotally it seems that people who may care enough to try and contribute meaningfully are now more likely to abandon the comments section and Google+ out of frustration (just as this article concludes with). This could be turn out to be nothing but a win for the trolls, especially considering that removing the new features enabling them would be to render the system identical to the old one.
I don't like the channel myself but a _very_ popular personality called PewDiePie has now disabled comments on all his videos due to the change. Other channels seem to be following suit or considering it. If you would like to hear a very honest spiel about the frustration these changes provide, search for a channel called NerdCubed and look at his recent videos for a video on the comment section. The comments that could be found under your average YouTube video were already enough to drive a content creator to exasperation as is. Rather than helping, this has seemingly made things significantly worse.
I know I'm not the only one here to say that if you like well-formulated discussions like those that arise from your post, stick around and be a part of HN...
"Billionaire or footnote, billionaire or footnote? Think. Think."
They should start paying dividend. It's the third largest company in the world by market cap, behind Apple and Exxon, and the only company of its size that pays no dividend.
[1] http://investor.google.com/pdf/2013Q3_google_earnings_slides... [2] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG
Definitions 1 and 2 are opposites. So, is he perturbed or not? "This is totally weird", or "this is weird, but I can so cope with it". Who knows.
Certainly this is the usage I've heard and used for the last 20 years or so.
You could class this usage as "perplexed" but with a specific flavour of 'perplexity at the unimpressive nature of the subject'.
Like "no more?" as in "isn't there anything else to it?". I don't see how "no more" suggests being flummoxed/confounded. [Yes I know that's not how "logo-genesis" works]