Google's Secret Weapon To Fix YouTube's Awful Comments: Your Real Identity

New motto: 'Broadcast your real self'

YouTube has some of the worst comments on the Web. They?re actually the worst, according to John Herrman at Buzzfeed, who wrote, ?YouTube is a comment disaster on an unprecedented scale. All of the worst things that could be said have been said here.?YouTube IS the room with the million monkeys and the million typewriters, but they haven?t even gotten half-way though Hamlet yet because they?re too busy pitching feces at one another.? Last month, tech blogs such as Wired and Gizmodo reported that Google had a ?magical mystery? ?secret weapon? in the works to clean up the cesspool that is the comments section of YouTube. That weapon has been unveiled, and it is? *drum roll, please* ? a request that YouTubers reveal their actual identities.

First spotted by Betabeat, Google-owned YouTube started begging users to reveal their real selves when they visit their accounts and attempt to comment or upload a video. First, you get a pop-up like this:

If you say you don?t want to use your full name, Google keeps pressuring you, taking the ?No means Yes? approach:

(There wasn?t a checkbox for my complicated reason: I?d prefer to have my Google+ account associated with my professional YouTube account, kashhillwastaken, to which I post animated videos about tech debates, rather than with my pre-journalism-career YouTube account that I now use mainly to watch friends? baby videos. But Google?s account mechanisms won?t let me do that.)

Will strongly encouraging people to use their real names really be the Windex that wipes away the dirty smudges on the YouTube screen? The hope, of course, is that people will be kinder and more civil without the mask of anonymity/pseudonymity.?We?ll see if that pans out, and how many YouTube users actually willingly link their accounts. It will be an interesting test case for the possibility of shifting a site from an entrenched culture of anonymity to one where real names are used.

I suspect that people who already tend to be civil will be willing to link their real names to their YouTube accounts, but that most nasty commenters will simply keep their masks on. Google encourages those making the switch to review the content they?ve previously posted, I predict that some careless users will accidentally link their real identities to their ugly YouTube ones, or rush through the process, thus revealing themselves to be the authors of some disturbing comments.

And how is Google suddenly able to do this? It?s thanks to that privacy policy consolidation that caused an uproar earlier this year. Now that Google has put everything it knows about you into one great big bucket, it can link your pseudonymous YouTube account with the real identity in your Google+ profile, and encourage you to make that link public. Whereas Google used that bucket to make its assistant Now more useful for smartphone users, this use ? to out YouTubers? real identities ? is not being done to benefit individual users, but to try to make a Google social networking site a better ? and more valuable ? place for online discourse.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/07/23/googles-secret-weapon-to-fix-youtubes-awful-comments-your-real-identity/

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