Pseudonyms Now Allowed On Google+ 238
An anonymous reader writes When Google+ launched, it received criticism across the internet for requiring that users register with their real names. Now, Google has finally relented and removed all restrictions on what usernames people are allowed to use. The company said, "We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be."
Youtube Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
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Same here. Sometimes I go to leave a comment on a youtube video but then it prompts me to set up a Google+ account.
So I just don't comment instead.
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Re:Youtube Comments (Score:4)
Same with me and Google Play for Android apps. I can't even give apps a * rating. Forget that.
Phillip.
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
They got worse with the redesign, though.
Old and busted: You could always look at page 1/2/3 of the comments or binary-search your way through the pages (pre-page-57 or post-page 57? pre-page 84 or post-page-84?) if a video that hadn't been relevant for ages became relevant. At 100 comments per page, all displayed in full, and popping tabs for each page with a bunch of middle-clicks, it was relatively easy to skim through the 99.99% of the shit to find the 0.01% you wanted
New hotness: Some fucking UXtard goes for infinite scroll, and you have to click to expand subthreads, and then click to expand any comment longer than three lines in any subthread.
Every time a UX designer fucks with something to make it more mobile-friendly, they make it less usable for both desktop and mobile users.
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Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
I made a JavaScript script that auto-clicks the "Show more comments" button every second, and I would leave it for a while. It can easily uncover 2000-3000 comments. It makes Chrome use up all the RAM though, I can't believe how much RAM you need to display a few thousand lines of text.
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
The information on the web is steadily disappearing behind shit UI designs. So many information sites of one kind or another have gone all flash, all icons, all pictures, all randomly spread over the page like vomit and repeated at random intervals in random blocks of "stuff you must see".
Fortunately slidy tiles will be out of fashion eventually and we can all laugh at the people who think they are cool as we should be doing now.
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This man for president, seriously. /general/ is getting worse for design, ever since tablets got popular, it's fucking gross and I'm sick of it.
Fuck those designers, fuck ALL of them. The internet in
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole problem is UX designers exist. I don't want a user experience. If a user interface is giving me an experience, it's getting in the way of what I want to do. User interfaces should melt into the background and explicitly NOT give me an experience. I should barely notice the user interface.
We need to get rid of UX designers and replace them with competent UI designers instead.
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:4, Insightful)
On this subject, you and I are in complete agreement. If I want an "experience", I'll put some music on, or a video, or a game. Almost nothing else on my computer should be an "experience" at all. Just serve up the information, and let me get to it, thank you very much. Didn't the world almost unanimously reject Clippy? Someone should have learned from Microsoft's mistake.
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..unnecessarily difficult experiences for some.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes,
Unnecessarily difficult, because google either already knows who you are (via some other registered service(s) i.e. Adwords etc) or will link in a relationship to your choosen "Pseudonym" to your real name, web history and other online events later on anyway.
So yeah google, what a stupid idea.
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I see the only major impact of this being that people can now leave pseudonymous comments on Youtube again.
I think you missed the big one: lots of people might actually start using Google+.
Sure, lots of people already did. But lots of people did not. Some people just didn't like the blatant privacy violations.
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It was a pain to set up an alias to comment or upload a video - even when you had an alias, it would keep prompting you to pick between them all the time. And if you chose to not log-in to a google account while using youtube, your search results changed and you could not create playlists (earlier you had a seperate youtube account on which you could create playlists). I like to watch british version of top gear, so I would often create playli
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I won't be using it - not directly - but I'll allow my profile to have a Google+ "page" now that it doesn't want to have my name associated with it.
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Those people shouldn't be using any social media.
I like G+ very few trolls and flamebaits. I've had some good conversations. It was nice being in a science thread and not here AGW denier bullshit, and actually discuss the science. Many other examples as well.
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That's a function of who is on your friends list, or who the community moderator is and how well they do their job, etc... etc... not of the host platform.
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Too little, too late in my case. I've managed to live without it for so long now, I won't be bothering.
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Re:Youtube Comments (Score:4, Interesting)
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I doubt that lack of anonymous accounts hurt G+ all that much, despite the enormous amount of noise generated by a relatively small number of people over the issue. Google's insanely stupid "invitation only" method of signing up coupled with their very feature incomplete system at launch likely did far more harm than anything else. Google just doesn't seem to get social media, and their lackadaisical "benign neglect" managem
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
Google+ is not about a popularity contest. It's about being social without being on facebook, or keeping track of special interest groups (including celebreties). The only real problem with Google+ was that it wanted to tie you to other stupid services like youtube, without even letting you go slumming on a separate account. Google should have left it alone instead of trying to get a one-acount-fits-all login (trying too hard to be a facebook clone instead of being something better).
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Not slumming is what made it great.
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:4, Insightful)
It was probably easier for them to tie all the data they collect to you with one account. That's what they seem to be after anyways, data.
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
My issue with it was that while I've come to terms with Google knowing everything about me, it doesn't follow that I'm OK with everyone else knowing everything about me.
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The irony being that plenty of "celebrities" are only known by their "pseudonym(s)" in the first place.
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Unlike Facebook, in that there is intelligence. The way I explain it (someone said it before me), Facebook is for keeping track of people I care about, Google+ is for keeping track of ideas/issues/things I care about. The intersection is very small.
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Google+ is just more privacy-invading social media garbage. You can pretend all you want that it's completely different from Facebook, but it's more of the same trash.
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Unlike Facebook, in that there is intelligence. The way I explain it (someone said it before me), Facebook is for keeping track of people I care about, Google+ is for keeping track of ideas/issues/things I care about. The intersection is very small.
fb also throws random crap "you might care about" at you. the link is still the people (or "entities"), and the business model is still in these links. that's all what advertisers want: bunches of linked people.
the very reason for the sick name policy thing was to convince advertisers that g+'s bunches were of real people, unlike fb where more than half of them are fake, meaning they could offer a "more valuable" bunch of linked people than fb. that was the only real difference between fb and g+, besides a
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Re:Youtube Comments (Score:4, Insightful)
The real-name G+ kept me away as I knew it was doomed. Many of my female friends use an alias, or a mis-spelled name, to avoid stalkers or getting hassled. Few of my guy friends would want to be on a service with no women on. Even I have 2 FB accounts, one for work friends and another for family. The fatal flaw, the one that killed various biometric companies as well as G+, is that in real life we are different people at different times. The person you are at work is not necessarily the person that is on a picnic with his family taking snaps of his loved ones or of wildlife.
Phillip.
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If a potential employer ever asked me for my Facebook password, I can plausibly say that I have no Facebook account, which they can verify by searching under my real name.
If a potential employer asks for your Facebook password, the proper response is, "Fuck off."
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Informative)
And Google Play comments, too...
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And Google Play RATINGS. If you used your real name on email and you had a not-so-common name you had good chances to have a review or rating on angry brids to come up in the first restuls when somebody googled you. WTF?
In fact what does it mean "Pseudonyms Now Allowed", precisely? You could change your name anyway for like 3 times and yes, it was supposed to be your own name but of course there was no way to police this for normal accounts. Of course, the drawback was that if you wanted to comment on Play
Re:Youtube Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort off. what they do is send links asking if you know certain people and give the names. They also have a link for if they misidentified them.
So some sorry sap will help them check your drivers license. It's probably someone who you worked with 10 years ago or who has seen you at a pub or something too. I get these all the time for random people in my area. I tend to shorten my name when signing up for crap and they ended up with my full name and I bet it was this exactly. I know the people they ask me if I know- they are geo-locating your ip or something to pass them around.
In other words (Score:5, Funny)
"Now that our pseudonym to single user identity resolution algorithm is reasonably accurate, go right ahead and make up a fake name."
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I already figured Google knows who I am and what all my aliases are anyhow.
You are absolutely right, but abandoning pseudonymity based on this reasoning reflects a common misunderstanding about how data mining works. Please don't give up so easily. You see, organizations that scrape and aggregate data from the web can only probabilistically connect all your aliases. That is, they only know with 97.3% certainty that YouTubeTrollKing7 is the same person as osu-neko, and they only know with 98.5% certainty that osu-neko is Brian Nekomori who attends Oregon State University (I made that up, by the way). That may not be the kind of privacy you would prefer, but it buys a lot of freedom, especially if everyone does it. You see, the Internet is kind of big, and man-hunts involve skewed data. (That is, most people are not the person they are looking for.) Since false-positives create big headaches for data miners, they tend to set their thresholds very high. For example, if they set their thresholds at 99.5%, those pseudonyms will not be recognized as connected to you.
So, what does this buy you? Well, it's not enough that you can go around committing crimes and expect the FBI to never find you. But, on the other hand, they're going to have a hard time achieving a conviction if they cannot find any other supporting evidence. Furthermore, people just don't seem to understand the power of exponential decay that occurs with probabilities. The more pseudonyms you use, the more the probabilistic connections among them decay into the low 90's, making it extremely cumbersome to link them all together. Imagine having to filter through the 0.01% of Internet posts that happen to falsely connect with your pseudonymns with high probability! No one wants to do that, so guess what, you have some privacy.
So, don't give up on pseudonymity. Yes, data mining is real, but no, it is not omniscient. Pseudonymity doesn't defeat it, but it makes them pay a dear price for finding you. Make them pay to know who you are. If everyone does it, the whole industry stops being so lucrative. The very reason data mining pays off so well right now is because of people who take the attitude that "it doesn't matter because they know anyway". So, stop it!
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure. I don't care about Google knowing my name. I care about schmucks on Youtube knowing my name.
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Now Google+ is sure to become the popular destination it's always been destined to be! I'm going to go on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Reddit and Tumblr and a site with Disqus and tell everyone it's time for Google+! Then I'll pull down my pants and tell all my friends on SnapChat!
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Hodor!
Bullshit + News = Pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
- The news Story = " removed all restrictions on what usernames people are allowed to use"
- So i clicked "Edit your name:"
- I enter "4D", in the name field
Result = "Please fill in the name fields."
Garbage news for a garbage product. Did any of the devs even think to "test it"?
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The name can't be blank, so that's a restriction they didn't tell you about. It's not clear if they require both a first and last name from your post, so I can't call you a dumbass on that one. But you do have enough characters for a first and last name, which may make them required.
From what you are describing, you are setting your "name" which, from the history of computers, has been first and last name. It sounds like they changed the policy either for names, which have a first and second part, or for
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They did that now? (Score:2)
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What they really banned wasn't "names which aren't yours" but "names which don't look like they are real names". There was no effort at all to enforce the accuracy of names unless they thought you were impersonating someone. But if you had a not-very-Western name, well, that was a possible problem. And once you got into the "we don't think that looks like a name" thing, they wanted real documentation of some sort.
I never did find a way to make that happen, but eventually I talked to someone who knew someone
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And once you got into the "we don't think that looks like a name" thing, they wanted real documentation of some sort.
Well, they never asked *me* for anything, and I certainly did (and do) qualify for that category.
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Re:They did that now? (Score:4, Insightful)
No... No... No... No! Those are his clones. The REAL Adolph Hitler lives in Argentina...
What difference does it make? (Score:2)
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Because I already have a pseudonym I would prefer to continue using?
This is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
having to use real names has made it far less trollish then other places.
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having to use real names has made it far less trollish then other places.
You're confusing inactivity with civility.
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If the people who are inactive would otherwise troll, then good. Which may or may not be the case.
My feed is plenty active. I think the fact that it doesn't toss crap in your face all the time, and doesn't have a bunch of of moving or annoying icons make people think it's not busy.
Much like a single lane that's backed up appear to have a lot of drivers, but a four lane highway with twice as many cars doesn't seem to ahve a lot of drivers.
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having to use real names has made it far less trollish then other places.
Enjoy yourself over there with the other people like you. Personally, I don't perceive why you would be trolled when you can just make an insular group of associates and block everyone else.
FWIW, I don't think that having your identity known by others has influenced you to dial back your trolling on this site. Then again, given that it's you, I'm not surprised that you prefer a highly structured social construct with many regulations.
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"Fallacies (sic) logic and inaccurate claims"? Geekoid, I suggest you consider your own self-referential sig regarding the Dunning-Kruger effect, as once again it applies to your own posted content.
I hope that was sufficiently clear to get through your addled mind.
I can perceive why you might seek out others who are discussing matters logically, as observing those people may allow you to someday learn how to engage in logical discussion yourself.
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having to use real names has made it far less.
FTFY. Full stop. Emphasis mine.
Custom URL (Score:2)
Google+ allows a custom URL.
When I registered my business for Google Places (now part of Google My Business) it had an "easy" way to get on Google+, so I set it up as part of my profile.
Then a few weeks later, they sent me an email saying I was preapproved for a custom G+ URL. It was not editable, and included the city of my business in it. So it ended up being around 40-45 characters long.
I tried to change it, but it seems it is not possible. The one I want appears to be available. Its 11 characters long,
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Anonymity makes sense for special cases. (Score:4, Insightful)
Whistleblowing, witness protection, for example. For most other cases anonymity degenerates into a cesspool of behavior that is not accepted in normal society. See every unmoderated anonymous internet forum ever.
Using real identities can vastly improve internet behavior. For example, a forum I frequent recently switched from anonymous posting to Facebook accounts. Overnoght the forum changed from endless spam and trolling to respectful discourse between actual people.
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... says "Snufu"
Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases. (Score:5, Interesting)
The same happened with my hometown paper but the reverse is true. They went from a moderated (meaning the spam and abusive posts were never posted since posts had to be pre-approved) with lots of insightful comments to almost no comments what-so-ever and the few that were commenting were doing so from fake FB accounts. So the noise ratio went way up on the comments they were getting. In short, they replaced their working moderation system with the FB system thinking the same way you do and got exactly the opposite effect.
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Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whistleblowing, witness protection, for example. For most other cases anonymity degenerates into a cesspool of behavior that is not accepted in normal society.
People suppress their true nature in "normal society." "normal society" bores me to tears.
Overnoght the forum changed from endless spam and trolling to respectful discourse between actual people.
More like useless, non-controversial discourse. By tying everything to real names, you make it less likely that anyone will do anything controversial, even when it needs to be done. Who knows if a future employer will decide to not hire you because you said something they don't like, even if you thought it was completely innocuous?
I'd rather deal with trolls and spam than have "respectful discourse" between fake people.
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People behaving in a civil manner towards those they don't like is the hallmark of civilization.
You assume (incorrectly) that there can't be "civil discourse" between people if they're anonymous. Other people have pointed out examples where real names improved nothing, and actually made things worse. If you want to speak to fake people who talk about nothing, by all means, require real names. Trolls are so scary, right?
Barbarity is never far away.
I assure you, civilization isn't going to collapse merely because people have anonymity and privacy, no matter how thin-skinned you may be, and no matter how many people say controversi
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Using real identities will also mean that some people will decide to never comment, because they value their privacy. For every troll you discourage by using their "real name" (probably not their real name anyway, and they always make a new account or connect from a different IP), you'll lose many other people who would have given useful comments, but won't do so if they were going to be identifiable. You will never know what you're missing. Really, a comment should be evaluated regardless of who the pe
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Or who don't want their comments in one forum linked to a completly different and unrelated forum.
Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're failing to distinguish between anonymity and pseudonymity.
You could argue that "seebs" isn't my "real name", although it's the only name I reliably answer to. But I've got ~30 years of history using this name, and nowhere near as much visible history under the name on my government ID, so this is the one I care about.
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Have you taken a look at Facebook posts lately?
You seem to be confusing real identification with having actual moderation in an online forum.
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Whistleblowing, witness protection, for example. For most other cases anonymity degenerates into a cesspool of behavior that is not accepted in normal society. See every unmoderated anonymous internet forum ever.
We are talking about pseudoanonymity here, not anonymity. And we are talking about moderated discussion. I disagree that it is only usefull in special circumstances. Using real name is big security risk for anyone. Internet is vast and you never know what deranged individual will take interest in your person. If you provide your real name, you are opening yourself to several identity theft related attacks which can be very nasty. This is very old topic which was perfectly explored for example in this articl
This is excellent news... (Score:2)
Miles O'Toole, Mike Hawke, Man-hung Long, Hubicha Kokov and Hugh G. Rection join me in applauding this long-overdue initiative.
Well, it still says my name violates policy (Score:3)
When I attempt to go to Plus, it still says my account is flagged for name violation...apparently, it's not fixed for those already so-flagged.
Reviews next (Score:2)
Yay! (Score:2)
I can now finally get a Google+ account and do ratings on Android apps...
Too bad it's a few years too late... Had google offered this when they launched Google+ they might have actually become a decent competitor to facebook. Now it's too late.
Fine, if they tell you which are psuedonyms (Score:2)
You want, of course, to block all email from pseudonyms.
Just Call it ASSBOOK (Score:2)
What great news! (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone is chatting about it on Twitter and Facebook!
Now everyone can use theri real name (Score:2)
The real name policy had rules that excluded people's real names. Now that the rules for what constitutes a real name don't matter everyone can be sure that their real names won't be excluded.
Yay! (Score:2)
Welcoming and inclusive (Score:2)
"For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place..."
Neither here nor there, but this is the kind of language companies usually use just after being spanked for discriminatory-like* practices.
* "Can't have my name attached to a post about controversial topic X in the current political climate whilst keeping my day job -> excluded from the service -> more controversial ideological groups more excluded -> discrimination!" ...I wo
legal ramifications of identity verification (Score:2)
i think one of two things happened, here. first is that it might have finally sunk in to google that even just *claiming* to have properly verified user identities leaves them open to lawsuits should they fail to have properly carried out the verification checks that other users *believe* they have carried out. every other service people *know* that you don't trust the username: for a service to claim that they have truly verified the identity of the individual behind the username is reprehensibly irrespo
Too little, too late. (Score:3)
My problem with the real name policy wasn't using my real name on Google+. When I had a Facebook account, I used my real name there.
My problem with the real name policy was that if you used Google+, it would retroactively change all your OTHER Google services to use your real name. Half of the people I use my GMail account to communicate with don't actually know my real name. Now, of course, I could get a Google+ account and continue using the same name I've been using on my GMail account for years.
Except that I don't actually use GMail anymore.
At the time, Google+ was sucking up other Google services and forcibly integrating them. I didn't see why GMail would be an exception to that in the long run and I wanted nothing to do with it.
So it's great that they've removed the real name policy and are no longer agressively integrating their other services into it, but...
Too little, too late. I've already left.
Re:Anonymous Coward for the WIN!! (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, "Anonymous Coward for the WIN!" should be the headline of this story.
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Restore the glory of the Internet? You mean to go back to a time when most people posted on Usenet with their real name and email address as their signature? The time when even political discussions were civilized?
From my point of view, anonymity was the worst thing that happened to the Internet.
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How horrible it is when people can say controversial things without people and employers holding it against them for all time. Privacy and anonymity are awful!
Re:The Internet is meant to be anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
With "say controversial things" you mean trolling?
Is that seriously the only thing you can think of? Take controversial topics like child porn, pedophilia, etc. Get on the 'wrong' side of an argument and you may find yourself the target of an angry mob - perhaps literally.
Don't you think life would be better for you if you could assume who you are and what you think instead of having to hide and having to be a hypocrite?
Don't you think life would be better if the world was perfect? Well, it isn't. You risk not being hired, being fired, losing many opportunities, and being harassed by the government. You also chase away people who don't want any of the things I just listed to happen to them. Maybe you expect people to just ignore all that, but the fact is, people don't. Some people change and convince themselves that they're being themselves, even when they're not. I don't want to hang out with fake people.
Besides, I like my privacy. I like knowing that it's difficult to tie many things to me.
Do you like it when people lie to you in order to obtain some kind of friendship from you?
No, that's why I like anonymity.
But my guess is you never posted anything which could justify it.
You base this on nothing. And since when is this just about me? I'm more afraid of others ceasing to produce insightful and thought provoking content, all in the name of stopping "trolling," something that only thin-skinned people have trouble dealing with anyway.
Re:The Internet is meant to be anonymous (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you know whether those were their "real name"? I knew a guy who once got interviewed for a newspaper, and they reported his name exactly as written; Tsu Dho Nimh.
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From my point of view, anonymity was the worst thing that happened to the Internet.
no. it was massification, sadly. it's a bitter irony and it doesn't look like universal access (duh) will make us globally smarter anytime soon as it should have done, and we thought it would do.
i've been on the "net" since even before internet, and never ever used my real name, anywhere, nor did most of the people i met. some did. i also never saw a reason to put my personal email address on usenet for everyone to collect. what for? i just shared it with people i wanted to exchange email with.
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I've been thinking about this a lot, and I disagree.
I think what needs to happen is forums need to charge for people to post. A penny a post.
I think that will remove a lot of trolls right there.
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You were pretty much always allowed to have an alias.
I played one of the early games on the G+ platform, got quite involved in the community. It was fairly common for players to have multiple characters, which required multiple accounts, and there was no shortage of fake "real" names. For every John Michaels in that game, there was a Michael Johnson alongside them.
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In the early days of google+ there were reports of people losing their entire google account (not just google+) for signing up to google+ under something other than their real name. I can see why people would be reluctant to take that risk (however slight) with their main google account (throwaway accounts are another matter).
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Someone I know had that happen to her even though she had never intentionally signed up for any part of google+. Something caused her account to get tied to it, then they nuked her stuff.
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Will they now restore the nuked accounts? Was her account restored later? Maybe they've restored it now.
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Exactly.
I've been asked to sign up to Google+ for one reason or another a few times (and refused) and been signed up without being asked another few times. No promises, but the next time that happens I might not bother to delete the account.
As it happens I do use my real name, but I don't see why I should have to prove it to anyone. (And people, mostly Americans, do sometimes assume that I made it up; if I recall correctly, the phrase used on the most recent occasion was "sexually explicit joke username".
Too Little, Too Late (Score:5, Interesting)
Google+ was trying to be a social network, and one of Google's execs (I think Eric?) also described it as an "identity service", which is something advertisers may want but slightly fewer than zero readers and writers actually wanted. No Facebook kill here, even if it does stick around longer than Orkut (which mainly took off because John Perry Barlow gave a bunch of invites to friends in Brazil, and Brazilians thought it was a great service for gossip.)