Petition against forced Google+ integration on YouTube hits 112,000

http://www.zdnet.com/forced-google-plus-integration-on-youtube-backfires-petition-hits-112000-7000023196/

by threatmodel • 13 years ago

261 158 13 years ago

vanderZwan• 13 years ago

First they came for Google Reader...

vdaniuk27• 13 years ago

I guess it is a complete coincidence that popular "we are now hacker news" thread appeared on 4chan and four posts against real name policy on Youtube are now on the front page of HN. All submitted within 24 hours. /s

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.

tty• 13 years ago

Put in perspective, this absolutely nothing.

Put in perspective, it absolutely is something. It's the biggest public outcry Google's faced thus far.

vdaniuk27• 13 years ago

"It's the biggest public outcry Google's faced thus far." Care to share what metrics are you using to define that?

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.

onli5• 13 years ago

I guess it is a complete coincidence that popular "we are now hacker news" thread appeared on 4chan and four posts against real name policy on Youtube are now on the front page of HN. All submitted within 24 hours. /s

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…

vdaniuk27• 13 years ago

Yes, it is. Not alone, but given the argumentation that Youtube-comments did get even worse because of this change.

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.

corresation2• 13 years ago

I do not understand what drives this sort of activism that we're seeing regarding YouTube and G+ comments. Why it's suddenly such an issue on HN, worthy of such passion and fanaticism.

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.

vdaniuk27• 13 years ago

People are claiming that is straight, undeniably evil of Google to merge identity systems. I say that those commenters don't really know what evil is and their priorities are way off.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

You may have missed the bigger issue of powerful multinational corporations waging an all out war on the concepts of anonymity and privacy in the internet.

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.

gte910h2• 13 years ago

White man here, with a skill based job in a hot industry: I'm guessing you might be too (or relatively similar)? Possibly even living in an accepting area of the country

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).

PavlovsCat2• 13 years ago

such passion and fanaticism

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.

alextingle2• 13 years ago

Look, this isn't a new issue. Lots and lots of us have been getting increasingly dissatisfied with Google for years. But each problem is isolated and hasn't made much of a ripple in the wider world...

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.

coffeeaddicted• 13 years ago

It's not because of YouTube comments, but about another social network trying to squeeze into our lives. The harmless fun they once had been is gone. Now something comparable to an immune system reaction is kicking in whenever a social network tries to grab another piece of us.

ancarda• 13 years ago

No coincidence. 3 of the posts against Google were all #1, #2 and #3 before the HN thread was started on 4chan.

leoc• 13 years ago

The article mentions people who are (iirc) some of the largest Let's Play creators as among the people who are taking action. If enough of them permanently move to a different uploader or disable YouTube comments then that will be something nontrivial.

Kylekramer2• 13 years ago

But there's the rub: comments aren't that valuable to anyone in the game but the commenters. No major YouTuber are moving off YouTube for a different uploader. Or even considering it. The biggest moves popular YouTubers have done are disabling comments. Google own the monetization of web video, so content providers won't leave. YouTube comments were already shit, so converting that shit into Google+ shit will at least help Google+. And if people disable comments, Google still get the views and gets to move the headache of dealing with YouTube comments to someone else (obviously if done in mass to a single discussion site this may be a problem for Google, but it is currently far too disjointed to matter much). From Google's perspective, the new comment system is a win-win situation.

r0h1n• 13 years ago

One of the worst pieces of journalism about Google+...

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.

vdaniuk27• 13 years ago

Literally no one is being coerced. No one. And this redefinition of words is what makes the article really bad.

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.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

Blue's "free things" remarks are where her article absolutely nails it. I called that out specifically commenting on her G+ post of this.

jrs99• 13 years ago

Do you think there are only 120000 angry users?

mcphilip• 13 years ago

One of the worst pieces of journalism about the Google+ policy, written by a "outspoken and controversial author and journalist".

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.

Kylekramer2• 13 years ago

http://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-ru...

aj700• 13 years ago

Wow:

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????

vdaniuk27• 13 years ago

Are you really trying to imply that Google does shitty software? Based on a single failure of spam/obscenity filter? Your reality distortion field must be really powerful.

anon13856• 13 years ago

Are you really trying to imply that Google does shitty software?

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...

lake992• 13 years ago

The spam/troll filter on Youtube really is egregious. "Nigger "*85 was just one such example. Obvious spam such as "my stay-at-home mother earned $X last month from Y job. Visit Z to find out more" are way too common. I have only seen two filters on youtube comments: 1. block URLs, and 2. upper limit on message length. I'll state it plainly: in this instance, Google does shitty software.

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.

Tloewald• 13 years ago

It seems to me that anything that stops a huge proportion of youtube comments from being posted is "a good start".

api• 13 years ago

The fundamental problem is that G+ is a Facebook imitation.

It's the sincerest form of flattery... of your competition.

eonil3• 13 years ago

The fundamental problem is Google is ad-saling company. So they always need to sell user profiles.

And now they needs more because there's competition - Facebook. That's all.

scholia• 13 years ago

"No one likes being tricked by a company that leverages a monopoly to force unrelated services and nonconsensual exposure onto people's lives."

bingobob• 13 years ago

Google really listen to all them Reader users

d0m• 13 years ago

I wonder if adding a "different identity" with a google account could fix that problem. So, yes, you still have to log and post with your real account, but you can pick another nickname that people would see. It may limit the trolling since it's not 100% anonymous.

Bahamut• 13 years ago

So I was all for the G+/YouTube integration change originally, but I came upon an issue that hit close to my own circle. I am a part of staff for a hobbyist website on video game music rearrangements, and the change created a split between the YouTube accounts of the organization and the account that created it.

Google really bungled the execution of this change.

wslh• 13 years ago

Same problem here. The can make a tool to move stuff from one account to another.

It seems like Google is suffering from the legacy issue.

summerdown2• 13 years ago

I understand her frustration with Google+, because I share it myself. I spent a long time thinking Google might help to save those parts of the internet I loved. They've certainly been a powerful player on things like the fight to preserve net neutrality:

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://mynameisme.org/violet-blue/

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

I think jwz makes a solid point on his blog about it too:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/09/bodies-hanging-from-bridge-i...

kordless3• 13 years ago

The fact that someone is capable of murdering people and hanging them up on a bridge has very little to do with your right to comment anonymously on a funny cat video.

gergles• 13 years ago

Yeah, they were great on net neutrality until it was inconvenient to their profit goals with Verizon and Android:

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.")

ctdonath• 13 years ago

Frequent occurrence of a word common in a large subculture hardly constitutes "spam".

panacea• 13 years ago

The UX people at Google must be wondering whether to venture into work on Monday.

mtkd• 13 years ago

I suspect they're probably at work right now.

teekert• 13 years ago

The service is free, you are the product, stop acting like a customer. Search for alternatives of don't use the service at all. "Vote with your wallet."

Edit: customer in stead of costumer

alextingle2• 13 years ago

A "costumer"? Do you mean "tailor", or "wardrobe assistant"?

pmorici• 13 years ago

Ha, this outrage is quaint. You know what it reminds me of is when Facebook made their big interface change a couple years back and everyone was all up in arms and signing petitions to change it back. Anyone remember what the outcome of that was? Nothing.

Brakenshire• 13 years ago

You're right in that much of the complaining arises from the new comment system - which is probably better than what came before, you could hardly make the old system any worse - and is futile. The issues of privacy intrusion, though, are valid, and will not go away.

username2232• 13 years ago

I don't comment or post on Youtube. I can't remember exactly whether it was around the time of your "big interface change" or not, but at some point I blanked my Facebook profile. I still post the occasional comment or chit-chat, but my several-year-old interests are probably not worth much money to them. My sense is that Facebook is becoming the next Myspace; maybe Google can be the next Alta Vista.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

Can a moderator please change the thread title? This is outright linkbait. Especially how it is written by "an outspoken and controversial author and journalist" accentuates this fact. It is a piece of opinion with a perfect application of Betteredige's law;

"But will Google listen?"

amakaruk• 13 years ago

You can't delete your Google+ account without deleting your YouTube account now. That's a devious move, Google. I want to keep my YouTube account, because I have videos on there with 100k+ views that I use for my resume. Now, I'm torn - what can I do?

mlangdon• 13 years ago

I can't sympathize with the "you're ruining youtube comments" argument as everybody knows youtube comments have been a vile racist backwater since its inception.

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.

jfoster3• 13 years ago

Seems it would be rather easy to use the YouTube API to create a YouTube site that allows anonymous comments. I'm supportive of what Google is trying to do here, because I've found YouTube's comments distasteful in the past. For everyone who is pissed at Google about this, though, why not just create a YouTube (like FixYT.com) that does allow anonymous comments? It wouldn't even take that long, and is probably more likely to address your concerns than than the petitions are, as I doubt that Google is backing down from this one.

thamlol• 13 years ago

Yup, just like the backlash against News Feed.

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1532225,0...

tszming• 13 years ago

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it made me laugh when I see this in the petition

    Petition by
    John Doe

Well played.

bad_user• 13 years ago

I am a Google Apps paying customer, I've always liked their products (heck, I even have a Google+ account) and I've always defended them, but their moves are breaking the camel's back.

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]

For everything they ask these days, those are the only 2 available answers. And you just know that if you won't accept willingly, they'll just shove it down your throat sooner or later.

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.

graeme6• 13 years ago

Feels like a clingy friend. It seems like Google doesn't see the difference between wanting to be with them "sometimes" vs. "all the time, for all the things".

eonil3• 13 years ago

You can't delete the last Google account from an Android device.

aestra2• 13 years ago

This might have been true at one point (I know it was) but my phone didn't have my Google account on it for a few days. I could use it, except I couldn't sync my contacts or presumably use the play store. It came on but not with any accounts attached.

dmxt• 13 years ago

You can. Well at least I could delete all accounts on phone.

dingaling• 13 years ago

You can't delete the last Google account from an Android device.

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.

wubbfindel• 13 years ago

Yes, I thought that was an interesting selection of choices.

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" :)

Silhouette• 13 years ago

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"?

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.

mkramlich• 13 years ago

Technically there are no hard/permanent Yes or No answers in human relationships. Only "Yes for now, I think" and "No for now, I think". Both positions can change later or be revisited.

mikevm• 13 years ago

Google is playing a war of attrition by using these annoying messages. They've been doing this for ages on YouTube by trying to force people into using their real names. Fuck this.

Kequc• 13 years ago

So you're using an Android phone and the Android app that used to handle your SMS messages is being replaced by their new messaging app. This is a problem? Why?

hrkristian• 13 years ago

I never truly understood why Google shipped 4.4 with two SMS apps.

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.

DrJokepu• 13 years ago

Surely it's not difficult to imagine why some people would feel uncomfortable with a social network managing their text messages? I know I would.

rtpg• 13 years ago

the google apps aren't entirely linked to Android a priori. In practice it's always bundled, but they can be seperate.

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.

pornel• 13 years ago

Yes, because it tries to nudge me towards using Google+ identity for messaging.

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.

dc2k08• 13 years ago

Highjacking top-comment to link mirrors:

http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1qtk69/

http://web.archive.org/web/20131114164356/http://www.zdnet.c...

ams6110• 13 years ago

For me, personally, if Google now wants to require a G+ profile and real name to post comments on YouTube, I don't care. They can find out the hard way whether this is a good idea or not.

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.

jessor• 13 years ago

Use Chrome's multi-user feature for the different accounts. I manage around 10 different ones (private, youtube, nonprofits, others) like this with ease.

judk2• 13 years ago

Joel and newspapers make no effort to verify your name. It is trivial to spoof.

Integrated Google identity is harder to spoof if you use real id in any other part of the systen

af3• 13 years ago

Practical question for all those JS/CSS hackers: Can we do something like this extension for YT: Disqus comments on any site (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60946)

Imagine then, switching from disqus to a p2p-distributed comment system on the whole internet?!

plg• 13 years ago

no, actually I can ignore it quite easily

tutysara• 13 years ago

Any mashups with reddit/disqus comments for youtube videos?

joeldidit• 13 years ago

I'm glad the backlash is too much to ignore. They are getting way too annoying and invasive. I don't want my real name linked to my YouTube activity, I don't want to be forced onto the still sub-par Google+ service (so they can inflate their user count), I don't want to be forced to sign into Google Chrome to have all my private data pushed to the cloud, and I don't want to be in any other way tricked or robbed of choice. It's not like I would've made the choice anyway, and this is just them saying get over it, I (and most it would seem) would literally not want to do these things.

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.

blah314• 13 years ago

There seem to have been half-a-dozen negative personal experience stories about G+ turn up this weekend. And now this. Is nobody else sensing organization behind this?

(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).

runn1ng• 13 years ago

not saying that I like the new comments, but.... there is a backlash like this every time a popular page goes with something a little different than people are used to.

Every time Facebook changes their design, there are petitions like this.

judk2• 13 years ago

How many votes do those ineffectual Facebook anti-change petitions get?

ChrisNorstrom• 13 years ago

This Google+ garbage is so illogical and incorrect.

===== 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.

Petition against forced Google+ integration on YouTube hits 112,000

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