> What was contentious at the time internally was the Real Names policy. This was all Vic Gundotra's doing. He routinely gave the example of not wanting to inte

> What was contentious at the time internally was the Real Names policy. This was all Vic Gundotra's doing. He routinely gave the example of not wanting to interact with someone called "Dog Turd". To me, this is stunning. IMO, Facebook beat MySpace because of their real name policy. However IMO this was because it enabled discoverability which got the network past a critical point. If I'm on a social network, I want to instantly know who friends and acquaintances are. Saying "real names are good because I don't want to talk to someone with a silly screen name" is a complete misunderstanding of the product. It's not about the personal preferences of power users, it's about casual users being able to use the network reasonably efficiently. Sure you can ask users to link accounts or whatever, that's part of the puzzle, but getting the network going is literally the problem you're trying to solve. Understanding how real names fit into the puzzle is pretty important. I'm not stunned that you disagree with real names. I'm stunned that (apparently) no-one tried to convince you why it was a good idea beyond the preference of some hypothetical power-user. As for global lock-outs ... yeah. Google isn't the only game in town, when it comes to email and data hosting. They're the only game in town when it comes to drunken comments on silly political videos (or my cat sitting on my keyboard as a livestream runs, or some accidental cut and paste error or whatever else will upset them). If I have to pick one, I'll keep watching Youtube and I'll take my serious business elsewhere, I hope Youtube is making a ton of money for them.