3 ms·

Wow, what a blast of fresh air, reading this. I miss the old Internet, when Aunt Sally still couldn't figure it out and certainly would be horrified to find he

by kb101 15y ago

Wow, what a blast of fresh air, reading this. I miss the old Internet, when Aunt Sally still couldn't figure it out and certainly would be horrified to find her birthday party photos posted on it, much less would she even conceive of going and posting them herself under her real name. Why does online marketing have to be built around maintenance of a database of people's Real Identities® ? If it's a page full of comments about guitars, stick a Stratocaster ad on it and be done. The Internet was supposed to be about freedom and personal expression. I used to scoff at things like Second Life and people on BBSes with ridiculously fake avatars, but now we have the horrors of everyday life invading and taking over the "virtual" space, which is less and less virtual every day. Even the visual and auditory carnage of MySpace was preferable to the cookie-cutter sameness of Facebook, helpfully tracking your every single move before you even think to make it, and broadcasting the mundane minutiae of everyday existence to all your "friends". I used to love Google when it first came out, it beat the pants off Alta Vista and it was a fantastic way to extract cool links from the vastness of the 'net. Now people log on to +1 each other on all the right topics and say all the right things and fit themselves into all the right pigeonholes. What if you want to go online not to maintain your identity as it is now, but to explore new ones? What if you need more than one identity? What if the whole notion of "identity" is something you find burdensome and ultimately repugnant? Well then, there must be something wrong with you and you must have something ghastly and awful to hide. So yeah, fuck those guys.

Tobu 15y ago
Unfortunately they are going against the famously unethical and privacy-eroding facebook, which has a real-names policy and the bans to show for it (also, NSA alumni on the board). And besides “the competitor already does it”, here is what Google's reasoning may be: Requiring your real name makes it easier for people you know in real life to find you. Interactions with people who know you in real life will keep pulling you back in, because these people are harder for you to ignore. Once you give your real name and the rest of your identity (they have been badgering for phone numbers for a while, to keep your youtube account, or open a google account, or to avoid annoying security/recovery notices when logging to gmail), you won't be asking yourself “should I be sharing this” questions, because you'll be in the habit of trusting them. Other features, like payments, deliveries and phone notifications, won't have to nag you for explicit personal info anymore. So I think they will offer temporary or per-circle identities at most, while people who want privacy from Google or the US and affiliates will have to fake it while it remains possible, or be shown the door.
- kb101 15y ago
  For what the future holds, we need look no further than the über-Netizens of the world, the South Koreans. If you want to get on Cyworld (30% of the population, 90% of the 20somethings according to Crunchbase), you send in a copy of your national ID card, your home address, phone, etc. and wait to be approved for an account, after which you may post on the site. I still think there is a hugely underserved market in the social space, comprised of people like me, who don't want an extension of their real life identity to follow them around online. Hacker News is full of people I don't know, but interactions with all these people I don't know are plenty effective at pulling me back into the site.
- alextingle 15y ago
  Their absolute requirement for me to give them my phone number is why I don't Google+.
0x12 15y ago
> broadcasting the mundane minutiae of everyday existence to all your "friends". Broadcasting it is one thing, recording it all is quite another.
drewcrawford 15y ago
> E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by kb101 15y ago

Tobu 15y ago

Unfortunately they are going against the famously unethical and privacy-eroding facebook, which has a real-names policy and the bans to show for it (also, NSA alumni on the board). And besides “the competitor already does it”, here is what Google's reasoning may be: Requiring your real name makes it easier for people you know in real life to find you. Interactions with people who know you in real life will keep pulling you back in, because these people are harder for you to ignore. Once you give your real name and the rest of your identity (they have been badgering for phone numbers for a while, to keep your youtube account, or open a google account, or to avoid annoying security/recovery notices when logging to gmail), you won't be asking yourself “should I be sharing this” questions, because you'll be in the habit of trusting them. Other features, like payments, deliveries and phone notifications, won't have to nag you for explicit personal info anymore. So I think they will offer temporary or per-circle identities at most, while people who want privacy from Google or the US and affiliates will have to fake it while it remains possible, or be shown the door.

kb101 15y ago
For what the future holds, we need look no further than the über-Netizens of the world, the South Koreans. If you want to get on Cyworld (30% of the population, 90% of the 20somethings according to Crunchbase), you send in a copy of your national ID card, your home address, phone, etc. and wait to be approved for an account, after which you may post on the site. I still think there is a hugely underserved market in the social space, comprised of people like me, who don't want an extension of their real life identity to follow them around online. Hacker News is full of people I don't know, but interactions with all these people I don't know are plenty effective at pulling me back into the site.
alextingle 15y ago
Their absolute requirement for me to give them my phone number is why I don't Google+.

0x12 15y ago

> broadcasting the mundane minutiae of everyday existence to all your "friends". Broadcasting it is one thing, recording it all is quite another.

drewcrawford 15y ago

> E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html