Petition against forced Google+ integration on YouTube hits 112,000
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Just today I received a message from Google Hangouts on my Android, asking me if I want Hangouts to manage my SMS messages. The 2 available answers were:
[Maybe Later] [Yes, I'm In]
Right now my trust in them is being eroded and fast. I'm already thinking of completely deleting my entire Google account and switching to alternatives. Google, if you're listening to this, just stop it.
The trick I used to 'liberate' people who were fed-up with the Google sync was to change the account password from a PC using the web interface when the phone was turned-off.
Then boot the phone and the account sync will error-out; at this point you should be able to delete the account from the phone.
Personally, I went with "Yes", to see what the service is like, after first checking that I could back-out later if I wanted.
But it did make me think; what sort of response would you get from a girl if you asked her out for a date - but only allowed her to answer "yes" or "maybe"? Probably something resembling "never" :)
I imagine the eventual response would be a legally enforceable restraining order and/or a harassment lawsuit, and if you continued to hassle her after that, it would be jail time.
Someone at Google might want to consider how poorly unwanted intrusions into people's lives are generally regarded in other contexts, and therefore how likely this approach is to work a long-term business strategy. After all, no-one has to do anything as dramatic as filing suit or calling the police to remove Google from their lives.
Hangouts is cool, it lacks some features of the old SMS app like notification bar options. That's annoying, features shouldn't be stripped like that.
The Messaging app has always dealt with SMSs, Hangouts replaced the google talk app, which never did SMS integration because it was supposed to be a chat client for google's network. The strategy's changed, and so there's this transition period.
Usually I wouldn't mind unified application, but I've lost trust in Google. I expect them to use dirty tricks to make me accidentally send Google+ messages instead of SMS.
http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1qtk69/
http://web.archive.org/web/20131114164356/http://www.zdnet.c...
But lots of forums (from the original "Joel on Software" and many others) have encouraged use of real names as a way to keep things civil. Same reason newspapers require "letters to the editor" to be signed. And YouTube comments could stand a little cleansing.
All that said, their "one account for all of Google" thing is really a PITA. I have several Google accounts that I use for entirely different purposes. One is for a project at work. One is for a non-profit that I help manage. One is my personal gmail. I don't want to mingle those, and I want a way to tell Google to stop asking me to do it. For now I try to remember to launch a new incognito/private browser session any time I access these services. At this point I'm NOT going to use Google services for any new projects/organizational purposes, and I am on the lookout for alternatives that provide what I need (mainly online docs, email, and listserv-like email groups) without all the annoyances.
Integrated Google identity is harder to spoof if you use real id in any other part of the systen
http://www.google.co.uk/help/netneutrality_letter.html
and SOPA:
https://www.google.com/doodles/sopa-pipa
... the difficulty, for those like me who thought Google might keep the internet alive is that it feels like betrayal to have them come out so strongly against anonymity.
I'm writing this because it helps to understand where Violet Blue (the author of the article) is coming from, if you realise she was one of the first people to be banned by Google for having a non-standard name:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-too-much-un...
... and has ever since been a strong proponent of the fact pseudonyms are important:
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/09/bodies-hanging-from-bridge-i...
People are not logical.
When I was 15 I had the police show up to my house because a 12 year old I was playing a game with lost and was furious for losing.
He made up a story about my friend and I threatening him and it finally took his father coming home to figure it all out and realize that his kid was lying.
His father called me and personally apologized, but he could have just went with it and I could have had problems.
I learned my lesson and make it at least a little harder to find out who I am on the internet.
http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/vzw-google-net....
(See "Because of the unique technical and operational characteristics of wireless networks, and the competitive and still-developing nature of wireless broadband services, only the transparency principle would apply to wireless broadband at this time.")
And now lets look at this article again. One of the worst pieces of journalism about the Google+ policy, written by a "outspoken and controversial author and journalist". Is the bit about 80 n-words in a comment relevant? Obviously not. Was it included in the article to argue that Google+ integration is bad and stir controversy? Certainly it was! The quality of the article is abysmal, offers no additional data or insights and is a linkbait bordering on spam.
But fine, lets look at some numbers: 120000 users signed a petition? Is it a significant number? Yep. Out of a billion youtube users? So that's about 0.00012. Put in perspective, this is absolutely nothing.
Put in perspective, it absolutely is something. It's the biggest public outcry Google's faced thus far.
I just dont see this. Including that Google got under fire for closing Google reader, NSA leaks, Wi-Fi data gathering, circumventing safari protections to track users, privacy policy consolidation, etc.
A common view, from what I gather, is that being a "data-driven" company, google has probably run the numbers and concluded that whatever "outcry" is going on, it is the result of a small group, and that it is not going to threaten their business. I am usually wary of such non-arguments. I really don't know what the short-term/long-term effects of all this are going to be (if any), but I don't think that any company can really predict the full extent of "bad press" either. So even if it's a relatively small percentage of the user base, writing off this movement as being "insignificant" seems a little unwise.
Possible. But on the other hand, that topic was a relevant topic here the last days anyway.
> Is the bit about 80 n-words in a comment relevant?
Yes, it is. Not alone, but given the argumentation that Youtube-comments did get even worse because of this change. Note, I can't judge that, Youtube isn't working for me atm. But she shows the argumenation and combines it with Youtubers leaving the plattform, at least for commenting. Failing even basic spamblock-checks is relevant and surprising (especially for Google, as Gmails spamfilter is great).
> Put in perspective, this is absolutely nothing
Wouldn't say that. Even if it's a small but vocal technically minded minority complaining: Ignoring those is not a good idea for a tech-company in for the long run. Look at Microsoft…
No, it is not. You cant cherry pick examples to prove your point. To argue that Youtube comments did get worse by supplying a single(10,100,10000) data point(s) is preposterous. One should do a comprehensive scraping of comments for many videos and many countries and many categories, analyze for quality and compare with previous data(without Google+ integration). Then you have a solid foundation for making conclusions. Anything else is just verturing into fantasy land.
I think I should try to make that clear: I think that the article is fine. And I think it is alright to base a first conclusion on the reactions of the top-channels, and to report about those reactions given the context. The example given is just an example, and doesn't claim to be more, but it is a convincing one, especially combined with the other reports claiming the same thing: That the promotion of discussed=controversial=trolly comments on this G+ inclusion, as it seems to work now, is a bad thing for Youtube comments.
And isn't it true that Google did say they will try to improve that? Could be taken as an additional point going for that observation.
Note that I agree that this is not final - to be totally convinced about the topic, we have indeed to look at more data (and give it more time). Maybe Google will provide an argumentation following that. Though this is a hard problem to analyze objectively anyway, the subjective impression is what matters.
PS: I don't think your argumentation warrants downvotes!
Agreed. And for that part, we can leave it at that.
But… This comment thread starts to get a bit too deep, but I have one more thing to discuss I think is interesting: How would you measure the issue? Well, because you said you would like to get a data foundation and then measure the quality - compared to my position, that it is a subjective impression anyway and therefore perfectly fine to base reports on the subjective impression of visible people using the system. I even agree that it would be nice to have that data foundation. But how to do it that way?
In my opinion, one can't simply measure length. Even swearwords are only a possible, but not a sufficient factor for spam. My first idea was to measure the use of the spam-button, but given that the G+-Inclusion might change the basis for that heavily (Comments lived on G+ before, where the circles change the dynamic), that might not be a fair comparison. So where do you see the possiblity to get that objective foundation for your line of reasoning?
1. Query lots(100 000s) of Youtube videos and store the comments associated with the video.
2. Repeat the operation after 6 months when the Google+ integration goes in full effect and there is enough G+ comments.
3. Label an initial set of comments (100 000s) as spam, non-spam, hateful, sexist, neutral, etc using Mechanical Turk.
3. Use a supervised learning ML algorithm on a training and testing dataset to understand perfomance and error rate.
4. Iterate as needed.
5. Run an algorithm on the whole corpus.
6. Compare the results.
7. Publish the results on HN and discuss the issue based on data.
Obviously, this requires lots of resources so one could try to reduce the input dataset and see if it is possible to draw any conclusions. What do you think?
The problems I see:
> 1. Query lots(100 000s) of Youtube videos and store the comments associated with the video.
One would have to do it as early as possible, before they change too much, as the thesis is they already changed. Though I would be surprised if there weren't some studies which used comparable data, maybe something like that is available?
> 2. Repeat the operation after 6 months when the Google+ integration goes in full effect and there is enough G+ comments.
Is there a next step of the integration? If not, one wouldn't have to wait that long.
> 3. Label an initial set of comments (100 000s) as spam, non-spam, hateful, sexist, neutral, etc using Mechanical Turk.
That is the main culprit. I'm not convinced that the new set of comments is easily detectable as offending, given that the context seems to be more readily used by the trolls. First and Rickrolling is a thing of the past. Besides, even given the low prices there, to rate 100k would cost a lot…
But still. Even something like "they changed a lot and are hard to compare" would be an interesting result.
The algorithm is of course the next question, is something like that easily doable given the nature of the comments?
Hm. Is that something you seriously consider to do? It could be an interesting experiment, it surely would be an interesting HN-worthy article - and if you are in academics, it might be even worthy of a publication (maybe something like "study of the effect of de-anonymization on commenters on an internet-plattform") or at least a few credit point. Is there a working API to get those comments?
tl;dr -- Logical operations are universal, but not the axioms.
For all that is happening in the world, and even just the tech world, whether you use one identity system or another to comment on someone's ripped from Vine video on YouTube sits pretty low on the importance scale.
This is YouTube comments we're talking about. The rotting garbage dump of the internet. The notorious, worst-case example of what happens when everyone airs their thoughts.
Now, apparently, we all are to remember as a system that worked? One that is so worthy of defense?
Maybe I'll take a break from HN for a week while people wave their flags and battle in the open plains over something so utterly irrelevant.
It seems very easy to make a permanent change you don't intend when you're using Google+.
You literally need less than 10 minutes to create a Google+ page http://www.google.com/+/business/brands/get-started.html
I previously worked for a startup, and had a google apps account. It was impossible to convince Google that the account shouldn't have a Google+ profile, or that it should be the same profile as my personal profile.
And to date I'm still not sure if my page is a youtube account page, a page on my personal account page, or both.
I'm sure there are answers to these questions. I'd say most of my research time was spent making sure that the page wouldn't do something I didn't want it to do, because Google+ burned me repeatedly by unintended behavior.
Google also tends to make things permanent, such as the capitalization of my Youtube account channel. So it's not as simple as "follow the instructions on the page".
If you care about identity, you have to follow the instructions on the page AND make sure the instructions won't lead to something permanently wrong.
A support page on YouTube tries to explain the difference between Google+ Profiles, Google+ Pages and Google Accounts [3]. But the fact that a Page can be managed by up to 50 different people suggests, at least to me, that the use of Pages to create and manage your pseudonym is more incidental than intentional.
[1] https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1710600 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747875 [3] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323?hl=en
There's no clear way for me to undo the damage. Screenshots I've posted for my YouTube configuration preferences don't show what other's equivalent shots do. I'm, frankly, not interested in jumping through hoops to get what Google might offer by way of account segregation now, and change its mind on in another 3, or 6, or 24, or 72 months. Clearly I cannot trust it to respect my specifically indicated wishes, and clearly, the company doesn't respect its users (in many ways, I've detailed these elsewhere including on HN).
Oh, and both identities are pseudonymous. And I studiously avoided circling anyone I knew IRL to avoid outing myself. Never posted photos I'd actually taken, carefully edited screenshots to avoid showing revealing information (though I likely left in a few clues that would help narrow down my identity). Don't mention where I live, where I work, or how I spend my time.
Simply because my preference is to be able to speak freely and discuss things, though really, the "why" shouldn't matter. I simply prefer it this way.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/VZSL...
But sooner or later, the browsing habits out of the two active accounts are bound to converge pretty well. Remember you've been tracked not just when you post comments, but on every page out there that has a "+1" button. Then, there will be some close friends who'd be connected on both accounts.
In addition both your real and fake account are very likely to be accessed from the same set of IPs or subnets, locations and time slices.
This may sound complicated, but this sort of mining is just an extension of spam filtering techniques (to which at this point Google invested many millions), and requires zero human intervention. And since it can be done and there is an incentive for Google to do it, it will be done.
btw, I agree that Google will try to correlate account data. That has obvious business value. But it is not obvious at all that Google will flag accounts based on this correlation. That was your statement I was arguing against, not practical possibility of matching various accounts to the same owner.
Do I think feminists post or comment on videos about feminism or rape? Yes.
Do I think transgender people post or comment on videos about being transgender? Yes.
Is there a subset of the above people that wouldn't want their YouTube activity known to their family or employer? Yes.
And yeah, there's ways of preventing this but they're pretty difficult to figure out (the Google+ page route) and it's fairly easy to make a mistake. Especially if they keep changing things.
Yes, everyone is free to avoid using Google/Facebook/Popular Service X/. Now, which group are you advising to avoid using Google accounts? Members of marginalized groups are often those who must keep their identities private.
Your recommendation further marginalizes them.
Google and Facebook are infrastructure. We seem to be moving towards some version of "You can't be gay on google without telling THE WHOLE WORLD you're gay". Then your options are:
1. Tell the whole world you're gay
2. Don't be gay on google, pretend you're straight
3. Don't use Google services
4. Be gay on google, but without being forced to reveal it to the whole world.
A person in that situation has to choose one of options 1-3 above. Whereas I, as a white, straight, male, can post publicly about most things without fear of anyone knowing. That's how this policy effectively marginalizes already certain already marginal groups.
Edit: To make things perfectly clear, I'm suggesting that access to Google services is about as important in our society as, say, banks.
There are reasons for wanting a mask that are legal, ethical and mandatory. My life is of more than middlin' importance to me.
I totally fail to understand the crass blindness of those who limit their reasoning to their own bland case.
If that is "irrelevant", I suggest you read up on the course of human history over the past century.
Are there other more acute priorities, sure. But it's also important to maintain a society where we are actually free to address those other priorities without completely surrendering our identity to public commercial exploitation.
No, not on the internet. On the platforms they provide, for free, and for which they are responsible.
As it stands, it's just proof of the Greater Internet F-wad Theory [1].
This is rapidly becoming a distinction without difference.
Consider the bait-and-switch that has occurred with all of these services (Google, Facebook, etc.) - the initial model was free with minimal (or at least less) data gathering but as each service got more popular it has tried to get more and more data out of users. How is this in any way different than Microsoft's embrace/extinguish model in the 90s? Initially any competitors that had a different strategy were doomed to fail because hey, it's free right. Now there's no little to no choice left.
The cumulative effect is an embrace/extinguish of the "old" internet - the one that was about people communicating.
We are now rapidly approaching a point where every byte of data sent over the internet is monetized. Every email is scanned for keywords, every text message becomes a "like" in some database, every human interaction results in shareholder value. It's the triumph of capitalism over humanity.
YouTube is now requiring you basically own all content publicly. For people like you and I, this isn't a problem: We have a job we're not going to be fired over for being a little odd, have a different political opinion, showing off a skill we obviously spend a lot of time on, or having certain hobbies.
For the vast majority of people: This isn't the case. They can be fired for being odd (G+ Post: "Mr Corresation's star fox cosplay outfit") as it's just weird, and customers googling them find it. Their boss may find out they're a liberal when the boss is a conservative, and find out they're saying some things that are out there. The boss may find out they play D&D and are an accountant and he may decide this goes against his christian values.
It's a matter of "non-sanctioned identities". I'm a white, 30 somethings vegetarian with moderate views on a ton of things, who plays table top RPGs regularly but on a firmly adult schedule and attends a huge local convention about these things. This is all you can discern from my G+ and I'm worried about it. I'd far prefer to have an anonymous handle "BLAH BLAH 1979" and google not feel like my identity needs to be slathered all over my hobbies.
Now take that anxiety, and apply it to all the transsexuals, closet wiccians, in the closet gays and lesbians, hidden area tattoo fans, subscribers to odd philosophies, only slightly out there conservative philosophies (doomsday prep, huge gun collections), video game players, buffy the vampire game fans, historical reenactors, and all the other freaks and geeks out there. Or even a "stereotyping beating minority" (aka, the black man in a mostly white firm who dresses exceptionally well so white people think "he's one of the good ones" and hides his hip hop appreciation, or the executive woman who hides the fact she's a mother while actually caring about some mother/parent issues on the weekend) who'd prefer to not bring that up at the office.
G+ screws up all this when it's brought into that area. I can use it, you can use it, the mostly "white guys in 20's and 30's who work at google" can use it, but it really screws up a lot of the promise of the internet for other people who don't have it so easy.
Sorry about the long comment, trying to reach out to someone possibly like me who just sees the bad stuff going away (the outright bigotry, etc), but doesn't really notice the bad stuff coming in (the outing of everyone's private life).
He was addressing his remarks TO skeptical white guys who feel they have nothing to fear, by asking them to consider what life would be like if they weren't white people with harmless opinions and positions of privilege. The way an argument is framed often determines whether it will be listened to.
I'm not ashamed of any of my opinions or ideas, but I certainly don't want to make it easy for people to go quote-mining or to discover that I disagree with them on some issue where they're unwilling to tolerate disagreement.
Huh? Okay, let's say "3 stories on the frontpage" indicates passion, but where is the fanaticism? You need to take a break from HN for a week because of 3 stories about the same subject being on the frontpage? Come on.
> Now, apparently, we all are to remember as a system that worked? One that is so worthy of defense?
I agree that YouTube comments always sucked compared to even the most basic forum. But not because of trolls and stupid people. Depending on the video, you could have perfectly fine discourse or humour. If you're not aware of this, blame the videos you're watching, but don't generalize from them. People talk about personal things on YouTube, too, and sometimes they want to support each other without making their identity known.
Stuff like this, the actual value to be had in communicating, is what necessitates protecting it from spam, trolling etc. It's not to protect the people who "just want to watch videos" and can't help but glance downwards and throw fits over how stupid some people are. So if you're not involved or interested in YouTube comments, why would you care? And if you are, why wouldn't you?
This dismissal a la "it's just, you know, youtube comments" just doesn't work for me. Yeah, and? I know there is a line, and that you can't just allow anything everywhere all the time, but generally: if one doesn't stand up for the freedom of expression for silly, stupid or simply young people on a site that's potentially about everything and nothing, how committed are they? And if people being stupid is a problem, how is censoring that stupidity a solution? It's YouTube, not SomeTube.
And I say this as someone who has been using his real name on YouTube since 2006, and rarely comments. If only the people having real stakes in it would speak out against such crap, the people having real stakes in it would be fucked; so the rest of us have to use our imagination, and show a little solidarity. People high on the "importance scale" generally can look out for themselves, after all.
What? Few of us work at Google. We don't have the numbers. And even if we did, we can't predict what the outcome of the backlash and bad PR will be. Maybe it will be like the times people got upset at Facebook, which didn't really change much[1]. Maybe it will be like when people got upset at Digg and it basically killed the site.
I don't see people getting particularly emotional here. I'm not sure you know what emotional looks like. This is emotional: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs (Note: she managed to get her issues fixed in the end)
[1] I would note that the Facebook privacy issues were things that didn't really affect 99% of users, for most people the information that leaked didn't matter and the people probably didn't notice. The YouTube situation is a bit different because as well as the privacy concerns (which I think alone wouldn't be enough to have any lasting impact) there is also the fact that the switch over was completely bungled and has resulted in people turning off comments on their videos because the new system has so many problems: hugely long comments, allowing outside links, ranking comments based on how much response they get (i.e. moving trolls to the top).
>I'm not sure you know what emotional looks like.
That's rich.
I feel like I'm repeating myself here (and perhaps this is a point that Googlers will never grasp, 42 shades of blue and all that) but many things can't meaningfully be expressed as a cost-benefit analysis. In this case, if you had asked me before the switch to come up with a cost benefit analysis (assuming I worked at Google and had the data) I could probably have come up with some figures, but the size of the errors would have been so huge as to make the exercise pointless.
Are you arguing that people sat in Google and seriously believed they were able to accurately quantify the cost of a huge raft of negative articles across the mainstream media and a bunch of the most popular users of the site shutting off their comments or leaving the site? (Assuming they even predicted the possibility of that happening). I just don't believe anybody can put a cost on that in advance. If that is really how decisions are made in Google then it is hardly surprising that their brand is so damaged.
Throwing around numbers is easy. It doesn't make the numbers right or relevant.
Making vague statements about this topic and some of the people who care about it, isn't an analysis of any kind, either, or an excuse to dismiss the valid points being raised by others. And saying it's such a cesspool that the issue is irrelevant either way is not exactly contributing to the discussion, is it.
I honestly cannot come up with a single benefit of this; I mentioned some costs I see and so have others, lots more eloquently. And anecdotes do matter because this is about people and large scale effects on billions of individual lives. You can't measure or calculate any of this exactly; you have to listen to individual stories and apply your own experience, there is no shortcut.
Not caring is one thing, but it's quite another to openly proclaim that one cares so little, that they just might have to take a break from HN for a week until this terrible infection (surely 4chan must be behind it, it can't have anything to do with when Google made the change) simmers down, but not without asking others why they care, as if they hadn't already stated why.
There are currently six (EDIT: actually seven) separate stories regarding this on the front-page (and they'll almost certainly keep coming for weeks as everyone tries to capitalize on some of that tasty outrage), and it's actually pretty good right now, as it tends to be midday: overnight is usually the real garbage time, when various pseudo-political issues tend to more easily get pushed up.
This dismissal a la "it's just, you know, youtube comments" just doesn't work for me.
A site owned by an all-encompassing information juggernaut (who absolutely have strong profiles of every user who touches that site. I've seen various people claim this is all to target advertising, as if Google doesn't already combine it all into a very accurate profile) saw that their comments were broken -- this is without question, and the overwhelming sentiment on YouTube comments has always been extremely negative -- and they tried to fix having multiple identity system, as companies always do when they have multiple systems.
In doing so they tried to cater to both sides of the coin, and maintained the ability to hold pseudo-anonymous profiles (that pseudo being just as imaginary as it always has been).
Mass outrage. People intentionally trying to scorch Earth to demonstrate a point (the irony of being assholes to demonstrate that the world has assholes apparently lost on them). What a boring waste of bits.
Is it a big deal to me that Google messed up their automated AdWords "publisher" interaction script, and cut off my income for a few weeks? Why yes, yes it is... but that doesn't mean that anyone else cares about that. Even if Google's generally poor supplier relations affects a lot of people (and it does), there's never enough of them for it to affect Google, the brand.
Same goes for any number of other Google problems. Did the "nym wars" cause lots of disaffection amongst Google users? Yes, but again not enough. Did adding lots of pointless JavaScript to search results pages piss off a lot of people? How about the fact that search results are much less specific/useful than they used to be? Unilateral changes to the privacy policy? Or Google Reader? Code Search? Etcetera, etcetera...
Google have created a huge amount of simmering resentment over the last few years. So, once an issue like this starts to get some traction, there are a lot of people ready to wait in line to put the boot in.
That's a nice opinion, and you're entitled to it. But please don't try to present it as a fact.
> written by "a outspoken and controversial author and journalist"...
I don't see anything wrong with that. Since when did HN veer towards safe and conservative journalists or authors?
As for the straw man argument about the N-word, I don't think that was the gist of her article. For me, this is where she nailed it:
Before anyone tells me I can't complain about "free" things, and starts to remind me that Google hasn't done anything directly to feed the U.S. Government's flagrant - and growing - surveillance law abuses enacted on civilians, consider this.
No one likes being tricked by a company that leverages a monopoly to force unrelated services and nonconsensual exposure onto people's lives.
Hundreds of thousands (actually, more) are being coerced, through threat of withholding essential utilities (email, work docs, etc.), to consolidate their online identities, tie it to real life and real names, reveal friends and family connections, have communications scanned, be put in advertisements, provide phone numbers and credit cards numbers, and more, while discovering that service settings and privacy defaults are being changed behind the curtain.
And when they complain and demand privacy, the ability to give informed consent, and control over their personal information, they're told they're doing settings wrong, the policies are really for their own good, to send in their IDs for verification, that they agreed to all this in the beginning anyway, it's too late, that this is how everyone does it, and that wanting privacy really means something else because only good people don't have anything to hide.
If she is referring to holding the personal data hostage as coercion, user is always free to leave Google properties while retaining most of their data. Google has one of the best data export tools that include documents, email archives etc. So that's straight out misinformation.
see: Google Takeout.
That's a straw man right there. The article is clearly marked as an opinion piece in its summary. The op ed sections of news contains activism, not journalism.
Google really bungled the execution of this change.
It seems like Google is suffering from the legacy issue.
Spam Filter Not Triggered By Typing "Nigger" 85 Times.
Some new gold standard for shittyness in software. I know a lot of Googleplexizens moved to Fb and Apple, but, huh????
I'm happy to make that argument. We are talking about a site with user comments that allowed unescaped HTML [1].
One of the frustrating things about using Google services is that over the years it has become apparent what a mess the user accounts backend is. There must be a dozen or more different 'types' of youtube accounts (depending on age, if they opted in or out of various levels of gmail/g+ integration over the years etc), so it's no wonder the attempts to consolidate and merge that mess has been so buggy (although I can see why they are desperate to simplify the situation). With the high staff turnover at Google, who at Youtube still remembers the difference between an account that opted to be tied to a gmail account in 2009 and one that didn't? (I think at some point that latter became impossible; I seem to remember that I lost access to my oldest YouTube account because I kept refusing to provide email and/or phone number information and in the end they just killed that type of account).
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/07/pranksters-have-a...
As it is now, your comment states the following:
Google did some software with bugs and bad UX => Google does shitty software.
I can't argue against this for quite obvious reasons :)
Does it say anything about the overall software quality of a corporation that employs more than 45 000 people? No, it doesn't.
I'm sorry if you work at Google and feel personally insulted by this, but Google have put out a lot of crappy software. Good software too, but your original argument seemed to be that Google is so magnificent that they don't have any shoddy products at all, and the very idea was unthinkable. That is clearly false.
1. I never stated that Google software is magnificent. I stated that it is ridiculous to judge a corporate giant with thousands of engineers by pointing to a bad bug created by one team.
2. I do not work at Google anymore. And my view of the company is worse after my employment there. But I reserve my criticism for issues that I consider to be really important like NSA spying or limiting keyword search data to website owners.
3. I feel personally offended with all the emotional FUD that is going on what is assumed to be one of the best discussion forums on the internet.
As a counterexample, most comments on Slashdot are far from ideal, but Slashdot has long had filters in place to prevent obvious trolling such as these. Given /.'s OSS-friendliness in general, I'm sure they would have given Google these filters, if Google had only asked.
Worse. It's doing shitty text mining, which is something they usually do pretty well at (seeing it's their core competency).
No-one complains when Apple messes up their cloud data storage (well, they do, but most people just say "OK, local storage + Dropbox still works"), but if the next iOS looked like a late 90s Java UI it wouldn't be a good sign.
You have been arguing that pissing off the user base doesn't matter, but there is a real cost. Fighting your users means things like people not reporting spam anymore, or deliberately misreporting things that aren't spam.
That's why I did not make that claim. The NLP talent at Google is likely better than that at any other company or university. My claim is that their expertise is not used for filtering Youtube comments.
BTW you did make a claim that Slashdot would give filters to Google so there is that.
Google+'s strategy is starting to look as seedy as Zynga's, and perhaps even more annoying. It seems like they are using confusion to get everyone to unknowingly and unwilling sign up for Google+ for YouTube (etc), and this is unacceptable. Their practices were questionable before, but this is outright wrong.
On a slightly related note, I'm annoyed to see that Google+ hasn't really gone anywhere. Some may argue otherwise, but I still sign onto the service, then wonder what to do next. There's nothing to do, and there's no point to it. They need to add more features that people want to use and that people have a use for (like Hangouts, I guess). What's the point of forcing 1 billion users onto a service on which they can do nothing but sit? To claim that you have as many users as Facebook? For shame Google.
I get "privacy concerns" but those are also hard to swallow from those in the habit of posting their real _face_ in public, for-profit videos. What's a name at that point.
Seriously, any action to drain the malarial swamp that yt has always been is a good action.
===== The Normal Way to Gain Users =====
- Build something people want because it solves a problem or their needs. If they don't sign up, then they don't want it, you re-iterate and re-envision the product, and try again until you get the "correct formula" and "winning product". You and your users are both happy because you've built something they want.
===== The Dumb (Google) Way to Gain Users =====
- Build something you want to force others to use because it helps your company's problem and needs. Not your customers. If they don't sign up, force them to use it even though they don't want to. You can't re-iterate or re-envision the product because you have users by force. You can't achieve the perfect winning formula for your product because no body was given a choice to choose it or it's other iterations. You have a losing product with millions of users who can't wait to leave. You and your users are unhappy, you can't grow your user base outside of the ones you forced it on and are frustrated that you spent so much money and time building the product and your users are pissed off at you.
(Not that I'm defending Google's "just the wrong side of creepy" approach, but if I was in competition with them I'd want to make sure everyone knew just how creepy they are).
It's the sincerest form of flattery... of your competition.
And now they needs more because there's competition - Facebook. That's all.
Every time Facebook changes their design, there are petitions like this.
Edit: customer in stead of costumer
Petition by
John Doe
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1532225,0...
"But will Google listen?"
Imagine then, switching from disqus to a p2p-distributed comment system on the whole internet?!