Google+-

[prog]

As mmcirvin and hrafn note in comments on my previous post, Google has been acting capriciously about perceived TOS violations involving names. If they happen to see a name they find fishy -- or that fails a regex, or that gets tattled on by another user -- they immediately lock that user out of their account with no way to get at their data until Google wills them back in.

(I'm alarmed to wonder how deep this lockout goes, thinking of the case of this 10-year-old who permanently lost access to all his Gmail after filling in a Google+ sign-up form with his honest age -- to the shock of his parents, who approved of his joining them online. But I expect there'd be an even louder freakout if lots of people were losing their email archives en masse, so I read this as a tangential issue.)

Weak-willed and prone to distraction, I'm not the sort to leave a service I'm enjoying in protest (at least not very quickly). But I find the argument that real-name use is a privilege of those with privilege both novel and compelling, and Google's position against it troubling. It also makes me belatedly realize that Google's celebrated decision to let Plus users make their "Gender" field private is less helpful to those whose truenames -- which, according to Google, they are required to use and make public -- signify their gender.

Bleh. We'll see. I really am going to have egg on my face if I end up disgusted with Google+; this'll be the Nth stupid social thing I've allowed myself to flip out over and spam my friends about, only to wonder weeks later where all the shiny went. The only social networks I haven't felt this way over are Twitter and LiveJournal, and I note that in both cases I very gradually figured out why they were cool and how they could work for me.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I *think* the phenomenon of getting locked out of GMail was something they quashed pretty quickly (though it's always the case that you can't trust cloud storage somebody else can lock you out of, which is basically all of it). I saw at least one reference to that being changed.

To me, the thing about mixed writing systems as indicator of fakeness is the most obviously broken bit. Especially considering how young Chinese and Chinese-American people approach informal names.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, I didn't realize until just now that they had to be prodded to make gender private; this indicates that they did not pay any attention to how this played out on LiveJournal in the very recent past.

This is all free ice cream, of course, and it's not as if they owe us anything. But if they want to be the non-evil alternative to Facebook they have to think abou this stuff.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it simply blows my mind that they're all "Here are these awesome Circles to make it easier to keep information within certain layers of privacy" and yet they started out forcing gender to be public. Did no one research how other social media-type places do these things?? And what the downside is of having gender public?

[lahosken (from livejournal.com)]

You can send feedback to the Google Plus folks by going there, clicking the gear icon at the top of the page, choosing the "Send feedback" item, and then filling in the little form. The relevant folks are more likely to see it there than here.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

They've already heard all of this stuff. It wouldn't, on the other hand, hurt to speak up to show the base of support, that it isn't just some troublemakers who want to be pseudonymous because they're up to no good.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Wow. That was so thoroughly an unintuitive place to look for the "feedback" link that when I went to the page after only kind of reading this comment, I failed to find it at all and closed the page. Thanks, Google.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

....oh, wait, no, correction to my previous comment.

Maybe that works if you're already a member. But for me, when I click the gear and choose "Send Feedback", I get sent to a page telling me that I can send feedback by going to Google+ and choosing the "send feedback" link at the bottom. Which I don't have, because I'm not signed into Google+.

It's as if they somehow don't want to hear from us.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Incidentally (sorry to keep prattling on; I'm sleep-deprived and punchy) LiveJournal has not been without its problems, and there have been times I thought about bolting.

Most of those, I now understand (both the occasional misfeatures and the DDoS attacks), are consequences of LJ's gradual transformation from a primarily American social network, community and journal platform into the leading public blogging platform of Russia, a role with different requirements and risks.

But LJ generally makes changes when people yelp loudly enough. Google has too, and I'm hoping they do respond to some of these concerns.

The thing is, there are a lot of things I like about Google+. The circles management is really good, the best implementation of this yet managed; the smartphone apps are just stellar, and I like the ability to share via email to people outside the garden. There are things I'd like to see added, like comment/post preview and threading. And there are these pure WTF decisions like the names stuff (which I get the strong impression was controversial within the company).

[jadelennox]

The funny thing is, as paranoid as I am in general about big companies, I was totally set to jump on this bandwagon until the real names thing fell out. I have lots of reasons not to want my real name associated with me in a big service like that, and only a few of them have to do with the big political issues that the Geek Feminism post gets at so well. A lot of them are simply about not wanting to engage with people who are more likely to find me on a large service. I think it's a very poor decision,and the actions they've taken around the policy have been dealt with incredibly scummily.

that xkcd comic is more true than we ever thought when it came out. It's just another Facebook alternative, albeit with apparently a better user interface.


(also, the anti-pseudonym people are always raving that allowing throwaway and pseudonymous accounts will turn any system into 4chan. Which explains why I spend all my time on LJ and DW running from the /b/ folks, I guess? There is nothing inherent about throwaway and pseudonymous accounts that turns people into douchebags on the Internet; plenty of people are willing to be dbags under their real name and plenty of services that allow pseudonymity work just damn fine.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

Agreed, but I wish to add that I'm still willing to hold out the benefit of the doubt for them. The reason there was more applause than jeering about the gender-field thing was that they did in fact react with relative speed to users' well-stated concerns. It really was nice to see that they're listening and willing to be flexible.

The truename requirement, since its tied into the way that G+ ties itself into the rest of the web, is a far bigger deal than a single account data-field. I can understand it taking far more effort to reverse, not just technologically but policy-wise, and I can also understand Google not saying a word about any internal discussion they're having about it until they come to a decision -- or even until they implement and release a relevant update.

...or they could be just waiting to see if it'll just blow over. Or something in between, where the rule stays on the books but they stop practically enforcing it (hi Facebook). Cannot know yet, can only keep making noise until then.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Some of the worst actors in the RaceFail debacle that overtook science-fiction fandom in 2009 were vehement opponents of pseudonymity whose primary attack was to reveal or threaten to reveal the identities of pseudonymous people, in retaliation for being accused of cluelessness on racial issues.

[hereticxxii.livejournal.com]

"But I expect there'd be an even louder freakout if lots of people were losing their email archives en masse"

Sadly its just what people have come to expect from these services these days.