"The promise [...] was that making people use their real names would incentivize them to behave themselves. It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names. In the meantime, people who have good reason not to post under their own names -- vulnerable people, whistleblowers, others -- are now fully on display to those sociopaths who are only too happy to press the attack with or without anonymity."
Told you so :(
Though I'm personally in a slightly different position, where my online handle is my public face that my hard earned reputation is linked to, but google wants me to use the birth-certificate name that nobody has heard of >:( (And it's not easy to just lie about my real name since I once bought something with google wallet, so they've seen my credit card and they want my profile name to be in sync with that...)
"It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names."
The frightening thing is that most of these people probably are not consciously trying to be jerks -- they simply do not realize that their behavior counts as "being a jerk". Thus, it's trivial to see why having to use their real name does not matter much if at all.
No, the frightening thing is the people who are jerks, know it, and don't care. The Jerry Springerization [1] of the audience. Further there is a bit of nerd backlash in the heartland going on. While the readers here might aspire to being the next Zuckerberg, in central part of the US there is a statistically significant part of the population which has this 'over rich, under religious, morally suspect' view of "successful" people in tech.
[1] Jerry Springer, host of a TV show with people acting badly on it and essentially becoming 'famous' has made acting badly more acceptable to way too many people.
"While the readers here might aspire to being the next Zuckerberg, in central part of the US there is a statistically significant part of the population which has this 'over rich, under religious, morally suspect' view of "successful" people in tech."
Working in the fly-over (and quite cold this time of year) part of the states in a position that puts me in contact with quite literally thousands of them every quarter, I call BS on this one. I wouldn't say that most people see tech folks as that. I would say that most people in the farmy part of the country don't really have an opinion about the tech industry, and those that do see tech people as generally useless, or just disconnected from the lives of the rest of us.
They believe that there is a lot of money being thrown around, and that some of the technology coming from the coasts will be useful in their lives, or will be convenient for talking to people, but for the most part they're indifferent.
It has very little to do with religion or wealth, and more to do with lifestyle (city v country) and focus (work v family).
Seems like coastal tech types are more judgmental than these people living in the sneered-at "flyover states". The amount of contempt you see out here in the bay area is just staggering.
There might be an attribution error happening here, since Jerry Springer himself was previously most famous for acting badly, for paying a prostitute with a check while on the Cincinnati city council.
The reference is to even spiritual people who don't regularly attend an organized church being referred to as 'godless.'
And I will grant you it is difficult to pull statistics from the people who choose to comment on web sites. So it would more accurate to say 'of that group of people who comment on web sites' various themes pop up regularly with regard to stories of tech billionaires, festivals like Burning Man, and current trends in technology.
But now you've got me curious so its off to run a couple of surveys...
Forget the conditional: everyone should seriously examine the question of whether they are a jerk from time to time.
It's a surprisingly subtle thing, to be a jerk. No matter how good you are, everyone is not going to like you. No matter how bad you are, someone is going to like you anyway. This is a truth that politicians are intimately familiar with, since their careers depend on maintaining awareness of how they are perceived by large groups of people. This is also well understood in Silicon Valley, where some of the most successful entrepreneurs are clearly and openly jerks - but who are revered anyway.
Complicating matters is that the standards of jerkiness change. It used to be that cussing made you a jerk. No longer true. There is a strong cadre of egoists constantly looking to eliminate the association between "selfishness" and "jerkiness" - with surprisingly effective results.
Last but not least, the public likes to witness the degradation of others. Most reality TV and daytime talk is based on this premise. It makes us feel superior, a kind of milder version of the mob mentality. (And they get what they want because people are willing to have almost anything done to them in exchange for attention, including being demeaned.)
Most YouTubers who make original content, like Vi Hart, are not doing it for attention. They aren't willing to participate in pop culture sado-masochism. What Google has unwittingly done is force this unhealthy dynamic on content creators.
The solution, of course, is to give content creators more control over their comments, over the community of people that consume their work. That is entirely possible from a technical point of view and I think would address this problem to everyone's satisfaction.
Yes, everyone should, but the real question is what the answer to question of whether you're being a jerk should be.
If you're being a jerk too much, maybe you ought to re-evaluate your personality, and make a bigger effort to empathize with and respect your fellow man. I don't think much of anyone here disputes that.
But I would also say that never being a jerk is just as big of a problem. If nobody has ever thought that you were being a jerk, maybe you need to learn to respect yourself and stand up for yourself more often, or else people will tend to not take you seriously or respect your opinions.
There's a large enough class of people that would tone down what they say if they were tagged about what they say ( what if I could link you back to some posts on Stormfront?), or if the person they were wishing to die had a name.
The bigger chilling effect is my situation. I would love to comment, but I'd rather not create potentially incriminating or embarrassing ties back to my personal life. People may think this is exclusively limiting trolling, but for me, it limits me discussing economics, politics, and controversial events that usually 30% of the population is always creating bad opinion about.
At least with pro username websites, you can opt into real names. I feel like this is the optimum approach, and that all others are subversive to a completely free conversation, which is what the internet first championed.
So, you posted this (at least, at time of me writing this) twice in this thread. I disagree and would like to provide a counter argument below at least one of your submissions.
1. You mix pseudonym and anonymous (your other post says "They do officially support anonymity").
2. The Real Name™ BS is still binding for the main G+ account. I have to tell Google my name, then they are kind enough to allow me to enrich their knowledge about me with all the online handles I use...
That _might_ be enough for the use case the GP described, it very much isn't 'anonymous', not 'pseudonymous' if you tell name and handle to the biggest ad company on this planet and still a real name policy that is utterly broken and stupid.
(Minor G+ rant follows)
People like me are seeing the technical proficiency of the G+ system every day. If my GMail tab (for whatever reasons) logs me out I can log in again - just to be sent to my 'suspended profile'. Note that I was looking at GMail moments ago and certainly would like to see Gmail again.
Instead of G+ I get this:
Your profile is currently suspended
Until your profile is unsuspended, you will be unable to use this feature.
Visit your profile to learn more.
where 'profile' links to https://profiles.google.com/me?hl=en - which goes in a loop (url again plus.google.com/something/foo, same text, no way out).
Creating G+ Page's for Youtube isn't tied/doesn't require having a G+ Profile. If you don't have one on an existing gmail address it just creates a disembodied Page while your main account continues G+-less. Granted new @gmail's come with G+ profiles so someone who wants to be anon has to go through the effort of putting in a fake name/DOB then deleting the profile. But fake name/DOB were required for a @gmail.com even before G+ existed, so the only thing which has effectively changed is the busy work of deleting the profile. So I stand by the statement that Youtube anonymity is in reach.
As for the rant, random brokenness/inadequate customer support is hardly a trait limited to G+, it extends to all their products.
I'd like a pseudonym system curated by me, in which I'm the only one linking up my various identities, not one curated by Google, where they, selected advertising partners, and the NSA, do the link-ups.
There is always a possibility to create a pseudonymous G+ account with a fake name. Its not like Google requires an ID to create an account. I don't get it, completely free conversation quality on youtube is abysmal. Why do you want that on Youtube?
Google has a real name only policy on Google+. This does result in accounts being suspended and all sorts of weird interactions with google staff/robots. For instance I have a friend who's last name is Love but created a google+ account using a pseudonym. Now she wants to use her real name but despite several attempts, they refuse to accept the change since the GOOG doesn't believe that it's real sounding enough.
And yet it's allowed me to call myself 'Bruce Wayne' ever since they started with this real-name crusade.
Honestly, the chilling effect worries me. I appreciate that a lot of people would rather just not deal with the like of Stormfront, and simply pretend to themselves that people like that do not exist, and that those views are not held, but this is a harmful way of dealing with anti-social views.
Even if we argue that a real-name policy would totally kill off all hateful comments, we have to consider if this is even a good thing; hateful comments should be met with rational arguments that undermine them, and show them to be incorrect. If someone says "all [people of some class] are evil", then one solution is to shame them into shutting up by linking their comment to their real name, but this just allows them to continue to think this way without ever hearing a dissenting opinion (I mean, they're hardly likely to bring this up in public, are they?).
The internet has a wonderful power to throw people of contrasting views together, and get them to show each other how they think, and allow them to change their minds. The mere fact that this process may sometimes result in offense isn't a good enough reason to stop it. If someone's views offend you, then it is your duty to prove them wrong and -- if you cannot do so -- consider that your own views might be incorrect.
I know I've personally debated with others online and learned from the experience, and I also know that I'd never have done so were it the case that I would have had my real name linked to the views I was espousing. It strikes me as incredibly harmful for society in general to attempt to silence offensive speech, not only because it means that those who hold offensive opinions can never be proven wrong, but also because it means that unpopular, yet true, opinions have no platform to be proven right.
It just hurts me to have activities getting logged into two different places, or always logging in and out depending on what I am doing at the moment.
If say I am watching a clip on guns, and then I make a comment on the clip, against or for, people will realize I watch clips on guns which I'd rather not share.
Its not like Google requires an ID to create an account.
5 out of 7 times I've tried to create a Google accounts over the last years I was asked for a mobile number (that an SMS was to be sent to) before I could register. Given that a huge chunk of android users synchronizes their address books with google my mobile number is effectively as good as my ID.
Unfortunately those 3 times I actually needed the account I was trying to create all required my phone number, so they are all tied to my real name (and address and birthday, etc.).
Google requires you to identify yourself with a telephone number. Unless you find some anonymous number(s) to use, you cannot hide your identity from it.
"Jerk" is always defined in a social context, though. In some circles, calling Obama a communist is jerky, in others perfectly acceptable if not obligatory. What is implied in "jerky" YT comments is that the social circles come into contact with each other, but there is no objective "jerky" that comports with the artificial construct of "common sense."
Really, for the purpose of Play reviews and public comments and other public fora outside of your circles, Plus needs a consistent "Pseudonym-wrapper" interface. That is, a way to create a pseudonym around your Plus account with its own icon. Others can send messages to the pseudonym and can reply to it, but not directly view the owner's real profile and link it back to their account.
Then YouTube channels or public fora could have a "No pseudonyms" options that requires a commenter to use their real + name if they want.
I still want pseudonyms within my circles, too. Never understood why I have to be John Smith to everyone who knows me as Johnny B, or Bumface, or WeirdKink66 or RantingPoliticalIdentity23. They're different facets of my social interaction, to different people -- and Google's social graph ought to be able to work that out, too.
For that reason, I only use G+ for super-anodyne stuff, gmail and androidery. And it's just a huge hassle to keep logging in and out, and very easy to forget until the comment is committed...
Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about the Pages feature for creating a business-related page, which is something I was unaware of.
It seems like this could be expanded to be a general-purpose pseudonym system without too much trouble. Everybody who has a YouTube account who wanted to keep their YouTube name already has a pseudonymous Page, so the groundwork has been laid. Pages work a lot like normal Google Plus users, and seem to have a pretty thick layer of separation.
Also, Google has added a "nickname" spot in the Google Plus account, so John Smith could have his nickname of "Johnny B" and his pseudonymous pages WeirdSecretKink66 and RantingPoliticalIdentity23.
The biggest problem I see with using Pages for this is
(1) the UI sucks. The name even sucks for this context. Users don't realize this feature exists and even if they have it it's tricky to switch to a Page identity for leaving G+ comments.
(2) it's not supported across the whole Google ecosystem - you can't leave Play Store comments with a pseudonym.
(3) There's no way to ban Pages from your Plus threads. I should be able to say Real Names Only if I choose.
(4) There's no full-out "Anonymous Coward" zero-login approach. Obviously there's good reasons to avoid that feature, but if they want Plus comment-threads to be a truly general-purpose social layer for things like Blogger and YouTube and the Plus circles, then the people running the thread need to have the option to enable fully-anonymous comments in their own space.
Who would have thought that the loud and obnoxious people would continue to be loud and obnoxious? That's craaaazy talk. :)
Also I have a hard time believing the switch to real names has even mostly to do with improving discussion. It seems more like a concerted monetization strategy through fine grained tracking and marketing.
This is exactly what I hate about single sign-on. There's no way to divorce services from each other.
It's a personal policy of mine that I never use Facebook or Google to sign into a site and use that site's "local" authentication. I use keepass to store my passwords so they're all unique anyway.
If a site doesn't offer their own authentication I usually bounce, unless it's really, really compelling (and off the top of my head I don't recall any that have met this bar).
Google (used to) have a controversial strict "real name" policy on G+ and even very aggressively shut down accounts that had "fake looking" names, despite these people having said names. It discriminated against people who had (legal) Mononyms (single name) which is actually common in some cultures. They also didn't allow "unusual characters" in names. They asked for proof of name for shut down accounts and sometimes that proof wasn't good enough for them.
More info here including the weird things that triggered the auto flagging of profiles, and what shut down accounts couldn't do:
If you change your profile name, the following things seem to trigger the automatic flagging system:
Mononymity, i.e. having only one name (and having just a dot, or similar, in the “last name” field).
“Unusual characters”
Actually unusual characters, like a heart symbol (❤).
Punctuation marks, including quotation marks, parentheses, and possibly even hyphens and apostrophes.
Unusual capitalisation (including capitals appearing within a name, as in McWhatever)
Spaces in either part of your name, for instance “Marie Claire” as a first name.
Name using more than one character set, such as a name which uses the Latin character set for their first name and the Chinese character set for their last name.
Certain words, possibly including profanity, names of famous figures or deities, etc.
Professional titles such as Dr., Prof., etc.
Suffixes such as III or Jr.
The above is an incomplete list.
This is beyond bizarre because there are all kinds of names with those attributes, especially "unusual characters," (hyphens and apostrophes, periods) spacing, many first names, many last names, letters, "profanity," deities.
There were reports of people who have "two first names" as legal name (example Ron Paul, and the fictional Gwen Stacy) being suspended without warning as a violation of the real name policy.
They seem to have relaxed that policy some. They got a lot of backlash because of the policy and especially their strict policing of it and blanket suspension without warning of "offenders."
Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. It's recommended that you go by your first and last name because it will help you connect with people you know and help them find you.
My understanding was that the "real names" policy was replaced a while back with a policy that your account only had to correspond with an "established online identity" and look vaguely name-like. (e.g. no throwaway accounts, no single-word "handles")
Accounts with odd names might still get flagged by the "does this look like a real name?" filter, but at least according to policy you should be able to submit an appeal if you can show other cases where the name is used online.
Also, I'm not sure what's happening in your case, but I personally have a G+ account and Wallet account under two very different names. If you're still experiencing this, Shish2k, please send me an email with some screenshots. This would seem to go against the "established online identity" policy, and I'd like to ask the G+ team about it.
Comments
"The promise [...] was that making people use their real names would incentivize them to behave themselves. It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names. In the meantime, people who have good reason not to post under their own names -- vulnerable people, whistleblowers, others -- are now fully on display to those sociopaths who are only too happy to press the attack with or without anonymity."
Told you so :(
Though I'm personally in a slightly different position, where my online handle is my public face that my hard earned reputation is linked to, but google wants me to use the birth-certificate name that nobody has heard of >:( (And it's not easy to just lie about my real name since I once bought something with google wallet, so they've seen my credit card and they want my profile name to be in sync with that...)
"It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names."
The frightening thing is that most of these people probably are not consciously trying to be jerks -- they simply do not realize that their behavior counts as "being a jerk". Thus, it's trivial to see why having to use their real name does not matter much if at all.
No, the frightening thing is the people who are jerks, know it, and don't care. The Jerry Springerization [1] of the audience. Further there is a bit of nerd backlash in the heartland going on. While the readers here might aspire to being the next Zuckerberg, in central part of the US there is a statistically significant part of the population which has this 'over rich, under religious, morally suspect' view of "successful" people in tech.
[1] Jerry Springer, host of a TV show with people acting badly on it and essentially becoming 'famous' has made acting badly more acceptable to way too many people.
"While the readers here might aspire to being the next Zuckerberg, in central part of the US there is a statistically significant part of the population which has this 'over rich, under religious, morally suspect' view of "successful" people in tech."
Working in the fly-over (and quite cold this time of year) part of the states in a position that puts me in contact with quite literally thousands of them every quarter, I call BS on this one. I wouldn't say that most people see tech folks as that. I would say that most people in the farmy part of the country don't really have an opinion about the tech industry, and those that do see tech people as generally useless, or just disconnected from the lives of the rest of us.
They believe that there is a lot of money being thrown around, and that some of the technology coming from the coasts will be useful in their lives, or will be convenient for talking to people, but for the most part they're indifferent.
It has very little to do with religion or wealth, and more to do with lifestyle (city v country) and focus (work v family).
Seems like coastal tech types are more judgmental than these people living in the sneered-at "flyover states". The amount of contempt you see out here in the bay area is just staggering.
There might be an attribution error happening here, since Jerry Springer himself was previously most famous for acting badly, for paying a prostitute with a check while on the Cincinnati city council.
So is being 'under religious' (what a ridiculous phrase by the way) in their view correlated to being morally suspect?
The reference is to even spiritual people who don't regularly attend an organized church being referred to as 'godless.'
And I will grant you it is difficult to pull statistics from the people who choose to comment on web sites. So it would more accurate to say 'of that group of people who comment on web sites' various themes pop up regularly with regard to stories of tech billionaires, festivals like Burning Man, and current trends in technology.
But now you've got me curious so its off to run a couple of surveys...
they simply do not realize that their behavior counts as "being a jerk".
There may also be enough people who consider perfectly non-jerk behavior (by some subjective standard X) to be jerky (by subjective standard Y).
I'd say that, if you hold the above opinion, you should seriously examine the proposition maybe I am the jerk.
Forget the conditional: everyone should seriously examine the question of whether they are a jerk from time to time.
It's a surprisingly subtle thing, to be a jerk. No matter how good you are, everyone is not going to like you. No matter how bad you are, someone is going to like you anyway. This is a truth that politicians are intimately familiar with, since their careers depend on maintaining awareness of how they are perceived by large groups of people. This is also well understood in Silicon Valley, where some of the most successful entrepreneurs are clearly and openly jerks - but who are revered anyway.
Complicating matters is that the standards of jerkiness change. It used to be that cussing made you a jerk. No longer true. There is a strong cadre of egoists constantly looking to eliminate the association between "selfishness" and "jerkiness" - with surprisingly effective results.
Last but not least, the public likes to witness the degradation of others. Most reality TV and daytime talk is based on this premise. It makes us feel superior, a kind of milder version of the mob mentality. (And they get what they want because people are willing to have almost anything done to them in exchange for attention, including being demeaned.)
Most YouTubers who make original content, like Vi Hart, are not doing it for attention. They aren't willing to participate in pop culture sado-masochism. What Google has unwittingly done is force this unhealthy dynamic on content creators.
The solution, of course, is to give content creators more control over their comments, over the community of people that consume their work. That is entirely possible from a technical point of view and I think would address this problem to everyone's satisfaction.
Yes, everyone should, but the real question is what the answer to question of whether you're being a jerk should be.
If you're being a jerk too much, maybe you ought to re-evaluate your personality, and make a bigger effort to empathize with and respect your fellow man. I don't think much of anyone here disputes that.
But I would also say that never being a jerk is just as big of a problem. If nobody has ever thought that you were being a jerk, maybe you need to learn to respect yourself and stand up for yourself more often, or else people will tend to not take you seriously or respect your opinions.
How about overt cesspool levels of racism and ignorance? I mean, come on. Have you been to YouTube before?
It's certainly something everyone should keep in mind; obviously it's sometimes true.
There's a large enough class of people that would tone down what they say if they were tagged about what they say ( what if I could link you back to some posts on Stormfront?), or if the person they were wishing to die had a name.
The bigger chilling effect is my situation. I would love to comment, but I'd rather not create potentially incriminating or embarrassing ties back to my personal life. People may think this is exclusively limiting trolling, but for me, it limits me discussing economics, politics, and controversial events that usually 30% of the population is always creating bad opinion about.
At least with pro username websites, you can opt into real names. I feel like this is the optimum approach, and that all others are subversive to a completely free conversation, which is what the internet first championed.
You may have missed that the new G+ system supports up to 50 pseudonym identities for a single Gmail account: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323
No fake G+ profile required, and each G+ Page identity is actually tied to its own auto-generated Gmail account, not the host Gmail account.
So they actually actively support your use case, its presence has just been drowned out in the commentary.
So, you posted this (at least, at time of me writing this) twice in this thread. I disagree and would like to provide a counter argument below at least one of your submissions.
1. You mix pseudonym and anonymous (your other post says "They do officially support anonymity").
2. The Real Name™ BS is still binding for the main G+ account. I have to tell Google my name, then they are kind enough to allow me to enrich their knowledge about me with all the online handles I use...
That _might_ be enough for the use case the GP described, it very much isn't 'anonymous', not 'pseudonymous' if you tell name and handle to the biggest ad company on this planet and still a real name policy that is utterly broken and stupid.
(Minor G+ rant follows)
People like me are seeing the technical proficiency of the G+ system every day. If my GMail tab (for whatever reasons) logs me out I can log in again - just to be sent to my 'suspended profile'. Note that I was looking at GMail moments ago and certainly would like to see Gmail again.
Instead of G+ I get this:
where 'profile' links to https://profiles.google.com/me?hl=en - which goes in a loop (url again plus.google.com/something/foo, same text, no way out).Creating G+ Page's for Youtube isn't tied/doesn't require having a G+ Profile. If you don't have one on an existing gmail address it just creates a disembodied Page while your main account continues G+-less. Granted new @gmail's come with G+ profiles so someone who wants to be anon has to go through the effort of putting in a fake name/DOB then deleting the profile. But fake name/DOB were required for a @gmail.com even before G+ existed, so the only thing which has effectively changed is the busy work of deleting the profile. So I stand by the statement that Youtube anonymity is in reach.
As for the rant, random brokenness/inadequate customer support is hardly a trait limited to G+, it extends to all their products.
I'd like a pseudonym system curated by me, in which I'm the only one linking up my various identities, not one curated by Google, where they, selected advertising partners, and the NSA, do the link-ups.
There is always a possibility to create a pseudonymous G+ account with a fake name. Its not like Google requires an ID to create an account. I don't get it, completely free conversation quality on youtube is abysmal. Why do you want that on Youtube?
Google has a real name only policy on Google+. This does result in accounts being suspended and all sorts of weird interactions with google staff/robots. For instance I have a friend who's last name is Love but created a google+ account using a pseudonym. Now she wants to use her real name but despite several attempts, they refuse to accept the change since the GOOG doesn't believe that it's real sounding enough.
And yet it's allowed me to call myself 'Bruce Wayne' ever since they started with this real-name crusade.
Honestly, the chilling effect worries me. I appreciate that a lot of people would rather just not deal with the like of Stormfront, and simply pretend to themselves that people like that do not exist, and that those views are not held, but this is a harmful way of dealing with anti-social views.
Even if we argue that a real-name policy would totally kill off all hateful comments, we have to consider if this is even a good thing; hateful comments should be met with rational arguments that undermine them, and show them to be incorrect. If someone says "all [people of some class] are evil", then one solution is to shame them into shutting up by linking their comment to their real name, but this just allows them to continue to think this way without ever hearing a dissenting opinion (I mean, they're hardly likely to bring this up in public, are they?).
The internet has a wonderful power to throw people of contrasting views together, and get them to show each other how they think, and allow them to change their minds. The mere fact that this process may sometimes result in offense isn't a good enough reason to stop it. If someone's views offend you, then it is your duty to prove them wrong and -- if you cannot do so -- consider that your own views might be incorrect.
I know I've personally debated with others online and learned from the experience, and I also know that I'd never have done so were it the case that I would have had my real name linked to the views I was espousing. It strikes me as incredibly harmful for society in general to attempt to silence offensive speech, not only because it means that those who hold offensive opinions can never be proven wrong, but also because it means that unpopular, yet true, opinions have no platform to be proven right.
It just hurts me to have activities getting logged into two different places, or always logging in and out depending on what I am doing at the moment.
If say I am watching a clip on guns, and then I make a comment on the clip, against or for, people will realize I watch clips on guns which I'd rather not share.
5 out of 7 times I've tried to create a Google accounts over the last years I was asked for a mobile number (that an SMS was to be sent to) before I could register. Given that a huge chunk of android users synchronizes their address books with google my mobile number is effectively as good as my ID.
Unfortunately those 3 times I actually needed the account I was trying to create all required my phone number, so they are all tied to my real name (and address and birthday, etc.).
Google requires you to identify yourself with a telephone number. Unless you find some anonymous number(s) to use, you cannot hide your identity from it.
"Jerk" is always defined in a social context, though. In some circles, calling Obama a communist is jerky, in others perfectly acceptable if not obligatory. What is implied in "jerky" YT comments is that the social circles come into contact with each other, but there is no objective "jerky" that comports with the artificial construct of "common sense."
To be honest, I do act like a jerk when one of the following conditions are met:
a) The user has arbitrary bad orthography because the user believes "her writing looks cool".
b) The comment represents ignorance towards something that it's pretty easy to search, or the user has shown negligence/laziness towards researching.
I don't think the primary "YouTube jerk" prevention system is intended to work on people that know or use the word "orthography."
Really, for the purpose of Play reviews and public comments and other public fora outside of your circles, Plus needs a consistent "Pseudonym-wrapper" interface. That is, a way to create a pseudonym around your Plus account with its own icon. Others can send messages to the pseudonym and can reply to it, but not directly view the owner's real profile and link it back to their account.
Then YouTube channels or public fora could have a "No pseudonyms" options that requires a commenter to use their real + name if they want.
I still want pseudonyms within my circles, too. Never understood why I have to be John Smith to everyone who knows me as Johnny B, or Bumface, or WeirdKink66 or RantingPoliticalIdentity23. They're different facets of my social interaction, to different people -- and Google's social graph ought to be able to work that out, too.
For that reason, I only use G+ for super-anodyne stuff, gmail and androidery. And it's just a huge hassle to keep logging in and out, and very easy to forget until the comment is committed...
Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about the Pages feature for creating a business-related page, which is something I was unaware of.
It seems like this could be expanded to be a general-purpose pseudonym system without too much trouble. Everybody who has a YouTube account who wanted to keep their YouTube name already has a pseudonymous Page, so the groundwork has been laid. Pages work a lot like normal Google Plus users, and seem to have a pretty thick layer of separation.
Also, Google has added a "nickname" spot in the Google Plus account, so John Smith could have his nickname of "Johnny B" and his pseudonymous pages WeirdSecretKink66 and RantingPoliticalIdentity23.
The biggest problem I see with using Pages for this is
(1) the UI sucks. The name even sucks for this context. Users don't realize this feature exists and even if they have it it's tricky to switch to a Page identity for leaving G+ comments.
(2) it's not supported across the whole Google ecosystem - you can't leave Play Store comments with a pseudonym.
(3) There's no way to ban Pages from your Plus threads. I should be able to say Real Names Only if I choose.
(4) There's no full-out "Anonymous Coward" zero-login approach. Obviously there's good reasons to avoid that feature, but if they want Plus comment-threads to be a truly general-purpose social layer for things like Blogger and YouTube and the Plus circles, then the people running the thread need to have the option to enable fully-anonymous comments in their own space.
Who would have thought that the loud and obnoxious people would continue to be loud and obnoxious? That's craaaazy talk. :)
Also I have a hard time believing the switch to real names has even mostly to do with improving discussion. It seems more like a concerted monetization strategy through fine grained tracking and marketing.
This is exactly what I hate about single sign-on. There's no way to divorce services from each other.
It's a personal policy of mine that I never use Facebook or Google to sign into a site and use that site's "local" authentication. I use keepass to store my passwords so they're all unique anyway.
If a site doesn't offer their own authentication I usually bounce, unless it's really, really compelling (and off the top of my head I don't recall any that have met this bar).
What's there to stop people from creating a Google+ account with a fake name?
Google (used to) have a controversial strict "real name" policy on G+ and even very aggressively shut down accounts that had "fake looking" names, despite these people having said names. It discriminated against people who had (legal) Mononyms (single name) which is actually common in some cultures. They also didn't allow "unusual characters" in names. They asked for proof of name for shut down accounts and sometimes that proof wasn't good enough for them.
More info here including the weird things that triggered the auto flagging of profiles, and what shut down accounts couldn't do:
http://infotrope.net/2011/08/04/google-plus-names-policy-exp...
From the link above:
If you change your profile name, the following things seem to trigger the automatic flagging system:
The above is an incomplete list.This is beyond bizarre because there are all kinds of names with those attributes, especially "unusual characters," (hyphens and apostrophes, periods) spacing, many first names, many last names, letters, "profanity," deities.
There were reports of people who have "two first names" as legal name (example Ron Paul, and the fictional Gwen Stacy) being suspended without warning as a violation of the real name policy.
They seem to have relaxed that policy some. They got a lot of backlash because of the policy and especially their strict policing of it and blanket suspension without warning of "offenders."
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271?hl=en
Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. It's recommended that you go by your first and last name because it will help you connect with people you know and help them find you.
The Google real name policy (and that breaking TOS is a crime in many jurisdictions), and the policy of requiring phone number on sign-up.
It won't stop the most persistent people who are out to hurt someone, but it will stop others.
Yes, it will stop the sheep. Not the wolves.
My understanding was that the "real names" policy was replaced a while back with a policy that your account only had to correspond with an "established online identity" and look vaguely name-like. (e.g. no throwaway accounts, no single-word "handles")
Accounts with odd names might still get flagged by the "does this look like a real name?" filter, but at least according to policy you should be able to submit an appeal if you can show other cases where the name is used online.
Also, I'm not sure what's happening in your case, but I personally have a G+ account and Wallet account under two very different names. If you're still experiencing this, Shish2k, please send me an email with some screenshots. This would seem to go against the "established online identity" policy, and I'd like to ask the G+ team about it.