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>> While I know a lot of people by their online handles, I also know their real name,

This can't possibly be true. I easily interact with 100+ people on various platforms. I don't know any of their names. I consider them "friends" in a way, but their real names are wholly irrelevant to me.

>> if you're talking to your friends via YouTube

No... You are having a discussion about the video. This is certainly not your friends.

You can argue this, but if everyone is friends talking to each other, why are there still so many people willing to blatantly troll people they obviously don't know?

I'm not sure what world you are painting, but this does not reflect any reality I am aware of.

>> This can't possibly be true.

I would not be so sure. I know at least the first name of most of the people I communicate with exclusively over the internet. Easily over 50 people. Regarding real names being wholly irrelevant, it is true you can get by without knowing somebody's name, but I find that people respond more easily and you can have a more honest, personal conversation if you at least exchange first names.

>> No...

Now maybe I'm a minority here, but most of the things on YouTube I find worthy of a comment have either been uploaded by a friend or commented on by a friend. If I am using it for communication, I'm very likely not wasting my time calling out a random stranger because of their opinion of some random video or adding mine to the mix of comment spam.

I'm guessing you know my first name along most every person here on Hacker News? Color me skeptical. I consider my interactions here semi-personal. The interactions I have in other places are quite personal. There is a gift of anonymity, and that gift is the allowance to be a only a small part of your real person for a few fleeting moments.

There are many honest reasons I don't want my real name associated with everything I do. Sure, I have my real name posted in various places, but that is because it is my personal and strategic choice, not a point of coercion from a company. Choice is very important to me.

Just imagine this: suppose you wanted to blog about something that could possibly be embarrassing or things that you aren't even talking to your wife, parents, or best friends about. I'm not talking about murder or anything, but things about yourself that are deeply personal and you have nowhere to turn to vent or get advice. The fact is that you are not willing to be vulnerable to people in your real life, but you'd like an outlet and opinions from others about your situation. Believe me, I've posted things in forums and other places about myself that are deeply embarrassing and disturbing. I don't want my next girlfriend to know and I certainly don't want my next employer to know about this stuff.

There is a certain class of people that don't want their entire lives spread across the internet. Heck, I'd venture to guess that your email is not jason@_____.com, and if by some early-adapting miracle it is, most people you interact with is not.

Suppose you wanted to create a G+ account to talk about your frustrations with anything. Would you be willing to be honest and forthcoming if you had to use your real name? Would it be at all entertaining or useful to other people going through the same things you are?

By most of the people, I mean almost the entirety of my contacts that I talk with via IM, email, or Steam, and excluding the 5 or so people I've responded to on HN.

And regarding wanting to blog about something that could possibly be embarrassing . . . well, I am very open about things. Why should I be ashamed of my opinion or a particular circumstance? I think there is no reason to be ashamed unless it is directly my fault, least of all my opinion. If it is something I have done wrong, I should own up to it or talk about what I have learned. Sickness, addiction, emotions, opinions . . . these are all things I should be able to talk about or proud of, not things I need to hide behind a username to open up about.

I realize this is probably not indicative of how the majority of people feel in this situation.

> I would not be so sure. I know at least the first name of most of the people I communicate with exclusively over the internet. Easily over 50 people

Then it means you're really not communicating that much over the Internet. Just to give you my personal example (and I'm generally an introvert), when it comes to "Internet discussion" I'm more or less actively involved in: a tramspotting forum, /r/soccer, /r/the_name_of_my_country, some urban development blogs and of course HN. I think I only know the first name of 3 or 4 people out of the hundreds (tens of thousands, if you include /r/soccer) of people involved in these communities.

You don't know the usernames of the tens of thousands of people you "communicated" with in those communities either.

You're of course right (with a few exceptions), but I thought that was what made the web so great?! Granted, this are changing as we speak.

I define friend as someone I'd invite over to my house. Those are the people I interact with on social networking sites and send YouTube links to.

Discussion forums are, socially, a very different thing than hanging out with friends, even though they both involve people and saying things. That's what I think HN collectively misses when talking about Google+ or Facebook; they think those are Internet Discussion Forums when they are actually something for closer friends.

You have to understand that very few people are willing to write this much on the Internet for public consumption by total strangers -- we are very unusual people, and most online services aren't designed for us. That's why we're typing hundreds of words into a Web 1.0 GUI written in a custom programming language, rather than using Facebook or G+ or Snapchat or whatever.

> You have to understand that very few people are willing to write this much on the Internet for public consumption by total strangers -- we are very unusual people

Seems you're a bit out of touch with "usual people" - or at least "usual people" under the age of 35. I do agree HNers are unusual, but if anything I would say they are more likely to be concerned with what they share publicly, not less.

You've missed the point entirely. That comment was about the nature of the content posted. Facebook, snapchat, et al are essentially click-click-clicking through pages heavy on visual stimulation and interacting through short bursts of text, now video and images too. HN is about reading and formulating arguments and exchanging walls of text in an environment completely free of visual distraction.

The type of person who tends towards HN will be different from the type of person who tends towards something like Snapchat on the above grounds.

Check the stats on reddit. There are a ton of people who want topic-focused discussion with strangers on the internet.

G+ seems to be trying to be both a public discussion forum and a hangout for existing friends at the same time. This is part of what makes it often unpleasant.

> If you're talking to your friends via YouTube, why would you use yet another nickname?

Who honestly talks to their friends via Youtube? It's really not a social networking site. People use it to enjoy watching videos and occasionally make a comment.

Judging from the widespread user backlash on the G+ & Youtube linking for comments it seems people quite prefer using a pseudonym when making comments on Youtube. For often good reason.

Also, although it has been discussed before, anonymity itself doesn't affect the comment quality on Youtube. From all the sites I've visited over the years where comments play a large role it's my opinion that a site's pre-existing and maintained culture determines the quality, apart from any moderation.

> Who honestly talks to their friends via Youtube? It's really not a social networking site. People use it to enjoy watching videos and occasionally make a comment.

This is the heart of the matter, Google views Youtube differently than everyone else. We use it to watch videos, not to communicate with friends, and don't consider it a social network - when we want to discuss a video with our friends we share it with them.

Google wants you to discuss it with your friends on Youtube (or G+) instead of posting it to Facebook (or wherever) and discussing it with your friends there.

  > Is there some intrinsic reason that someone be referred
  > to as "Jonathan Rockway" when you send them a message via
  > the SMS protocol, but "jrockway" if you send that same
  > message via Jabber?

Counter example: I'm internet-buddies with a person who goes by CUNT'N'PASTE. This is obviously not a name that complies with the Google+ naming policy, but it is the name they chose, and they should be permitted to use it. They were only able to register with Google+ by coming up with a fake name[1], and then spreading the word through other channels that they'd be using a fake name in G+ only.

They appear as CUNT'N'PASTE in my Android contacts app, because it pulls names from the Gmail contacts list, which I can edit so it complies with reality.

[1] Which makes G+ conversations confusing, because everyone has to remember that this person with the strange name in our comment boxes is actually Cunty, not whatever name G+ accepted.

Here's an idea, tell your friend to grow up and use a socially acceptable name instead - revolutionary I know!

Here's another thought: in some parts of society this is a socially acceptable name!

The redneck parts - totally ;)

Engineering is about making compromises. Given limited time, it probably makes more sense to support people with names like "First Last" because they are more common personal monikers than one-word obscenities with special characters in the middle. Yes, you'll annoy people named CUNT'N'PASTE, and that's regrettable. But you'll probably make a lot of First Lasts happy too.

It's important to balance the positives and negatives of a decision. On HN, we mostly see the negatives, since that's the sort of thing that people are willing to spend mental energy writing about on their computer. But surely some people like the new YouTube comments or Google+, right?

Possibly.

What really doesn't make sense is migrating someone to Google+ without asking, and then throwing them out since the account name didn't meet the higher name standard there. This has happened to a friend of mine.

Or telling them their real name doesn't look like a real name, and suggesting they send Google a copy of their passport. (Two friends of mine, one Swedish and one Israeli. 'Cos those people don't have real, proper names. And Google's policy totally isn't racist - it just has, uh, racist effects.)

> One thought about real names: what does your contacts database look like on your phone?

So my phone book is identical to a public identity, is it? Just because most people have contacts by their full name in their phone book, it means that everyone should use their full name publicly at all times and on all occasions? Because that's what you're saying.

I don't know about your country, but in the Netherlands this is why we have privacy laws. It's legal to have a calendar with birthdates which your family and guests see; it's legal to keep a phonebook full of personally identifiable data, but it's illegal to share either of those with any audience.

Note that, yes, that makes every Dutch person with the Facebook app conducting illegal activities. But it kind of sucks to sue all your friends for uploading your info, so nobody does it.

(Also, the answer to your question is: a mixed list of first names, full names, nicknames, and first name + nicknames.)

> Maybe what people want is a unique identifier that only they know, and then choose to share a different name with different groups of people?

Exactly, and that's what I'm doing. I don't have that many identities, but yeah I've got two or three that I share with different audiences. Everyone in that audience knows me by "lucb1e" and I even own a domain lucb1e.com. If I wanted anyone in that public audience to know me in any other way, I would have used another name. I don't want to use my full name. My full name isn't even a unique identifier and it's much longer than my nickname. In my opinion, full names are pretty useless most of the time.

Even my Facebook account has no full name, and people seem to know and recognize me just fine, even though I know many of them in real life (and they also know my full name).

But YouTube isn't really a social network. It's more often a video search engine. I don't want my search history on public display, attached to my real name. If I like a video, I don't want that to be visible if someone Googles my name.

Except the oldest one is a social network that respected privacy and anonymity at it's core, and the other one has a fundamentalist ideology of exposing everyone's real name and identity.

Google has owned youtube for 7 years and this year they decided to mess with people. Why?

Probably a combination of: having the idea, having the right infrastructure, and having a team of engineers to write the code and migrate the data.

I would have real difficulty sending texts to several friends (yes, the real-life kind that I invite round to my house) if my phone contacts forced me to list them under "real" name (rather than "lestaki" and "delph" and "raccoon" as they currently are).

I don't "want" a unique identifier; I don't mind having one, but I don't care having many. I already have different identifiers for different services owned by different companies, so why should I care that just because Youtube and Gmail happen to be owned by Google, it's an absolute necessity that I have the same identifier on both services?

I don't care and don't even need to know that Google search, Gmail and Youtube are owned by the same company; to me they are separate systems.

The "unique identifier" approach is solving a problem that does not exist.

Then, trying to force people to have a public "social" profile under their own legal name, under the cover of this non-problem, is just crazy and arrogant.

This is not supposed to mean I like the policy change, but most people I know, that don't have anything to do with technology, are rather confused by multiple accounts and are glad the account for YouTube and Google Search can be the same.

Imagine not insisting on unique identifiers at all. The horror. Your argument pretty much boils down to you being comfortable using real names. That isn't a great argument against letting other people do something else.

(This is one of those things where enabling consolidation is pretty much orthogonal to the interesting part of the discussion, which is really more about how much latitude the service allows users. Of course giving the option for consolidation will be great for some people.)