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What's with the Google Derangement Syndrome on HN recently? Any change in any Google service prompts the same "I'm taking all my toys and going home" response.

What's with the Google Derangement Syndrome on HN recently? Any change in any Google service prompts the same "I'm taking all my toys and going home" response. Google used to have a separate profile system just like profiles.yahoo.com, and like Yahoo, having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem. G+ is that unifying profile layer. Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself? Yes, optional, as in, I have hundreds of followers on G+ with obviously bogus profiles. You don't have to use G+'s social feed, you don't have to friend anyone. I personally barely use Twitter or Facebook, mostly as single-sign-on to forums and other sites.

Kurts 13y ago
It's either an unhealthy obsession with Google or just old fashioned astroturf. I have a third theory that since Matt Cutts started commenting here, he brought the SEO types with him, and they don't much care for fluctuating algorithms. Anyways it's like no one cares about a standard util Google drops it, and somehow social becomes a sin when Google dabbles in it. Any Google bashing item or just expressed feigned outrage often shoots straight to the top of the main page.
svitcov 13y ago
If Google just wanted me to add a few relevant details to my primary account for some obvious useful purpose, details that would be kept private, I would happily oblige. However, this goes beyond that: Google is asking me to share information with no apparent application use (birth date?! gender???) to ANYONE who stumbles upon my G+ profile. I am not against unifying their services - in fact, this is what Google's basic authentication service should and could have done - but that is not the full extent of what is happening here, as far as I can tell.
- tekacs 13y ago
  You don't actually have to share those details publicly if you don't want, to be fair. :/ Edit: for comparison and openness's sake, my profile: https://plus.google.com/116103902550362700148/about https://plus.google.com/116103902550362700148/about I have few qualms about sharing that, given that I know exactly what I've shared from there.
  - dannyr 13y ago
    Dude, I don't think you can convince him with facts.
    - login1234 13y ago
      Dude, maybe people do not want to provide that info to anyone.
  - svitcov 13y ago
    Thanks - I wasn't award that I could hide the info (it certainly wasn't made obvious by the dialog). I still think that forcing me to fumble around in G+'s settings to do this is unnecessary (although I can see why Google is doing this!).
  - adityarajbhatt 13y ago
    Wow, Cambridge! And yes, the profile privacy options are extensive and are painless to setup. I fully suppport the single-sign on.
pessimizer 13y ago
You must be replying to the wrong post. This post is asking whether others have been asked to create a g+ account in order to log in using Google, not "I'm taking all my toys and going home" or whatever childish way you want to characterize people who are "deranged" about Google.
- ketralnis 13y ago
  And how would you suggest that he reply to a growing trend that occurs as an aggregate across hundreds of disparate comments?
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    He could reply to them, or be silent. I don't know why it's so deranged to "take your toys and go home" aka stop using a service (even loudly), if you find that a change has been made that is a dealbreaker for you. The defense that you can only half-participate in g+ is not much of a defense because 1) people may not want to support changes of that sort with their patronage lest it continue as a trend, and/or 2) the thing being objected to was a forced escalation of participation - why would a user assume this would be the last and that half-participation in g+ will remain an option?
  - Gormo 13y ago
    Perhaps observing this phenomenon should lead him to consider that there might be some substance to these critiques, and not just dismiss them all out of hand as some sort of "derangement".
- cromwellian 13y ago
  I'm talking about the other responses to the OP. Lately, if Google is mentioned on HN in a story, you are pretty much guaranteed that several of the off-topic responses will be either something about PRISM, Reader, or moving to DDG/FastMail, even if the story, for example, isn't even about PRISM or politics. Reader Derangement Syndrome is another, with people seriously proposing in some comments that Gmail is a shutdown risk given Reader. G+ is Google's centralized system for single-sign-on and account profiles. It used to be confusingly distributed over multiple services, now it is unified. Oh, and it has a news feed associated on it at plus.google.com that you can totally ignore if you want. Some of the reactions to this are way over the top. I guess I'm burning karma points by posting this, but it is an annoying trend.
6d0debc071 13y ago
> Google used to have a separate profile system just like profiles.yahoo.com, and like Yahoo, having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem. No, it wasn't. It was very simple. You want an account for youtube, sign up on youtube, you want an account for something else - sign up there. You want your accounts to be the same login across all the services? Use the same login across all the services. It wasn't confusing, it wasn't complex, it didn't present any problems to anyone of even moderate intelligence. > Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself? It's not really optional when they start tying everything together. I don't want my real name tied to any of my online activities - but if my google accounts were stuck together through google+ it would be, because I use my real name on my phone. It's possible to lie of course, and tell a different lie with a different email address for every time you want to limit the degree to which different portions of your data contaminate other things. But it's a pain in the arse and only realistically possible because they're not enforcing their single sign on policy that strongly yet. They're made it far more complicated to keep your privacy than it was before.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  Having to create a separate account on N services with the same credentials is simpler than having a unified account? And what if your login is already taken on one of the other services, now you're forced to have multiple credentials. And then when you need to update something, like change an email address, 2factor authentication, or some other feature, you've now got to edit settings on many services. If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one, which is what everyone has been doing for a long time, even for gmail prior to G+, people would create multiple accounts. The model isn't K identities and N services, you need O(K*N) credentials in the worse case. It's K identities and N services is O(K) credentials.
  - noloqy 13y ago
    > If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one I did. I had to sign up with a "backup" email address though, for which I entered my primary email address. Now, whenever Gmail users send an email to my primary email address, they see the bogus name that I created the anonymous Google account with. Crap. And Youtube, please stop asking me to use my "real" name. Is it that hard to remember my preferences?
TrevorJ 13y ago
The issue as I see it is that there's a certain non-zero chance of getting your account suspended from service x or y, sometimes for reasons that are not common sense or self-evident. Considering how integral Google Drive and Gmail are to many people's workflow, it isn't good that you are forced, in effect to take on more risk by having so many services linked to it. As an example, there were cases of people losing access to Gmail after signing up for Google+ with a birthday that was too young to comply with the G+ TOS. Another example - it is fairly trivial to get an Adsense account suspended by using a script to commit click fraud against the target account. Similar things can be done to an ad-enabled Youtube channel. It's not outside the realm of possibility at all that a third party could cause you to lose access to your email account through one of these methods if your accounts are linked.
Gormo 13y ago
> What's with the Google Derangement Syndrome on HN recently? Any change in any Google service prompts the same "I'm taking all my toys and going home" response. This seems to be a bit of an inverted perspective. The trend in Google's behavior seems to indicate its own "I'm taking my toys and going home" mindset. This is almost literally true: Google is telling people who are using their "toys" "either come to my house and play under my rules, or you don't get to play with that anymore." > having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem. How is this a "problem"? What about the many users who want to choose specific services a-la-carte, and not be forced into compromising their preferences with one type of service just to have access to their preferred solution for another? "Unification" of services in this heavy-handed way is like Comcast telling its customers that if they want cable service, they have to get phone service from Comcast too, whether they want it or not.

Kurts 13y ago

It's either an unhealthy obsession with Google or just old fashioned astroturf. I have a third theory that since Matt Cutts started commenting here, he brought the SEO types with him, and they don't much care for fluctuating algorithms. Anyways it's like no one cares about a standard util Google drops it, and somehow social becomes a sin when Google dabbles in it. Any Google bashing item or just expressed feigned outrage often shoots straight to the top of the main page.

svitcov 13y ago

If Google just wanted me to add a few relevant details to my primary account for some obvious useful purpose, details that would be kept private, I would happily oblige. However, this goes beyond that: Google is asking me to share information with no apparent application use (birth date?! gender???) to ANYONE who stumbles upon my G+ profile. I am not against unifying their services - in fact, this is what Google's basic authentication service should and could have done - but that is not the full extent of what is happening here, as far as I can tell.

tekacs 13y ago
You don't actually have to share those details publicly if you don't want, to be fair. :/ Edit: for comparison and openness's sake, my profile: https://plus.google.com/116103902550362700148/about https://plus.google.com/116103902550362700148/about I have few qualms about sharing that, given that I know exactly what I've shared from there.
- dannyr 13y ago
  Dude, I don't think you can convince him with facts.
  - login1234 13y ago
    Dude, maybe people do not want to provide that info to anyone.
- svitcov 13y ago
  Thanks - I wasn't award that I could hide the info (it certainly wasn't made obvious by the dialog). I still think that forcing me to fumble around in G+'s settings to do this is unnecessary (although I can see why Google is doing this!).
- adityarajbhatt 13y ago
  Wow, Cambridge! And yes, the profile privacy options are extensive and are painless to setup. I fully suppport the single-sign on.

pessimizer 13y ago

You must be replying to the wrong post. This post is asking whether others have been asked to create a g+ account in order to log in using Google, not "I'm taking all my toys and going home" or whatever childish way you want to characterize people who are "deranged" about Google.

ketralnis 13y ago
And how would you suggest that he reply to a growing trend that occurs as an aggregate across hundreds of disparate comments?
- pessimizer 13y ago
  He could reply to them, or be silent. I don't know why it's so deranged to "take your toys and go home" aka stop using a service (even loudly), if you find that a change has been made that is a dealbreaker for you. The defense that you can only half-participate in g+ is not much of a defense because 1) people may not want to support changes of that sort with their patronage lest it continue as a trend, and/or 2) the thing being objected to was a forced escalation of participation - why would a user assume this would be the last and that half-participation in g+ will remain an option?
- Gormo 13y ago
  Perhaps observing this phenomenon should lead him to consider that there might be some substance to these critiques, and not just dismiss them all out of hand as some sort of "derangement".
cromwellian 13y ago
I'm talking about the other responses to the OP. Lately, if Google is mentioned on HN in a story, you are pretty much guaranteed that several of the off-topic responses will be either something about PRISM, Reader, or moving to DDG/FastMail, even if the story, for example, isn't even about PRISM or politics. Reader Derangement Syndrome is another, with people seriously proposing in some comments that Gmail is a shutdown risk given Reader. G+ is Google's centralized system for single-sign-on and account profiles. It used to be confusingly distributed over multiple services, now it is unified. Oh, and it has a news feed associated on it at plus.google.com that you can totally ignore if you want. Some of the reactions to this are way over the top. I guess I'm burning karma points by posting this, but it is an annoying trend.

6d0debc071 13y ago

> Google used to have a separate profile system just like profiles.yahoo.com, and like Yahoo, having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem. No, it wasn't. It was very simple. You want an account for youtube, sign up on youtube, you want an account for something else - sign up there. You want your accounts to be the same login across all the services? Use the same login across all the services. It wasn't confusing, it wasn't complex, it didn't present any problems to anyone of even moderate intelligence. > Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself? It's not really optional when they start tying everything together. I don't want my real name tied to any of my online activities - but if my google accounts were stuck together through google+ it would be, because I use my real name on my phone. It's possible to lie of course, and tell a different lie with a different email address for every time you want to limit the degree to which different portions of your data contaminate other things. But it's a pain in the arse and only realistically possible because they're not enforcing their single sign on policy that strongly yet. They're made it far more complicated to keep your privacy than it was before.

cromwellian 13y ago
Having to create a separate account on N services with the same credentials is simpler than having a unified account? And what if your login is already taken on one of the other services, now you're forced to have multiple credentials. And then when you need to update something, like change an email address, 2factor authentication, or some other feature, you've now got to edit settings on many services. If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one, which is what everyone has been doing for a long time, even for gmail prior to G+, people would create multiple accounts. The model isn't K identities and N services, you need O(K*N) credentials in the worse case. It's K identities and N services is O(K) credentials.
- noloqy 13y ago
  > If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one I did. I had to sign up with a "backup" email address though, for which I entered my primary email address. Now, whenever Gmail users send an email to my primary email address, they see the bogus name that I created the anonymous Google account with. Crap. And Youtube, please stop asking me to use my "real" name. Is it that hard to remember my preferences?

TrevorJ 13y ago

The issue as I see it is that there's a certain non-zero chance of getting your account suspended from service x or y, sometimes for reasons that are not common sense or self-evident. Considering how integral Google Drive and Gmail are to many people's workflow, it isn't good that you are forced, in effect to take on more risk by having so many services linked to it. As an example, there were cases of people losing access to Gmail after signing up for Google+ with a birthday that was too young to comply with the G+ TOS. Another example - it is fairly trivial to get an Adsense account suspended by using a script to commit click fraud against the target account. Similar things can be done to an ad-enabled Youtube channel. It's not outside the realm of possibility at all that a third party could cause you to lose access to your email account through one of these methods if your accounts are linked.

Gormo 13y ago

> What's with the Google Derangement Syndrome on HN recently? Any change in any Google service prompts the same "I'm taking all my toys and going home" response. This seems to be a bit of an inverted perspective. The trend in Google's behavior seems to indicate its own "I'm taking my toys and going home" mindset. This is almost literally true: Google is telling people who are using their "toys" "either come to my house and play under my rules, or you don't get to play with that anymore." > having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem. How is this a "problem"? What about the many users who want to choose specific services a-la-carte, and not be forced into compromising their preferences with one type of service just to have access to their preferred solution for another? "Unification" of services in this heavy-handed way is like Comcast telling its customers that if they want cable service, they have to get phone service from Comcast too, whether they want it or not.