Why JoeSchmo1976 isn’t allowed to join Google+: It’s not behavior, it’s aesthetics

Good read…I have objections to the Facebook solution, as I feel children who are Kneejerk in their nature, can hav
e a smudged existence based on a drunken party. Servers and the viral nature of the internet can permanently scar an individual caught in its crosshairs.

I recently setup freaky Snail on Google plus. I was surprised this was accepted. o now however. want to change my name to reflect my online name Fr3kysnail, and Google doesn’t want to accept. LOL

@fr3kysnail twitter

Jillian,

When I look into my G+ I see barely any such spammy comments. Most people I have circled stem from Western countries.
The problem about the nonsense comments, in my experience, only comes up with people from Middle/Far-Eastern + South-Asian countries. Wait another 5-10 years and they will be more familiar with online discussions and things will change.
This problem applies to all networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn and SALAMBC.

R.

I don’t have a problem with lists of spam comments on my G+, however I have the issue of not being answered or responded to by people who do.

I have the real name issue. For years I was CASUDI on Google, then added clarification for some to the last name. CASUDI=first, (Caroline DiDiego) = second. This is where my #SM friends could find me via CASUDI, a name I have used for over 30 years for all ONLINE & artistic endeavors, including producing documentaries for TV. However there is a business (only) segment that knows me by my other less “REAL” name so I added it at one time to my Google account. When I started G+ I was automatically CASUDI (Caroline Di Diego) and then my account was frozen for the use of CASUDI (BTW this is the first 2 letters of my 3 other names) ~ When I recently read that G+ was relaxing this issue I looked for this option to revert back to what I had when I started G+, but couldn’t find it. Do I understand this option is only for people with vast followings?

Before I switched off my Profile (and Google+) for being afraid that Google would cancel all my accounts if they disliked my pseudonym for some reason, my experience was mostly how tiny Google+ actually was. This was a strange feeling about a social network where you had a potential of being a user — because, well, Google+ would correctly find all those Gmail contacts and suggest you to add them on G+ too — but in actuality, few would join. They were all probably having fun on Twitter, Plurk, and Facebook. Most of them — in my case at least — all have pseudonyms.

So the conversations had this “early adopter” feeling. They were geeky, not mainstream — but that’s just because so few people used it.

Then the #Nymwars spread like wildfire, and before getting kicked out, I voluntarily removed myself first — but I keep a “real name” profile, which is just known by a very limited amount of people. Because of that, again, there is no “garbage” in the messages from people following me.

The conclusion I reach is that my group of intellectuals has no time for writing “garbage” — but that’s just the way I perceive my Circles. So few people were actively using Google+ that it just sort of felt a tiny, private environment.

When Google “claimed” that 400 million users had joined, I was skeptic: didn’t they mean that 400 million Gmail users had an easy option of adding a profile? Many did so, for sure — but that didn’t mean they became “users”. Or rather, active users. They just registered. Quite a different thing!

As a Second Life user, and doing often some presentations, I’m known to quote that Second Life has over 25 million users and has been around for a decade. But I’m aware that just a million logs in regularly. Of those, few are very active in the sense of being logged in several hours a day. This makes all the difference: as a consequence, most of the people I meet in Second Life are polite, considerate, and write well (no matter what country of origin they are). I might just have a thousand or two of “friends” there, with perhaps a third moderately active.

By contrast, Facebook “claims” that half their users are, indeed, active every day. It’s possible. I don’t really believe it, but I also have no basis to contradict Facebook’s claims — specially because my pseudonym was kicked out of Facebook, too :)

Where I see “pollution” in the messages is, however, on YouTube. There — how many users does YouTube have? 400 million? I would not be surprised — the comments are definitely showing how angry and insulting people are, all the time. The more popular a channel is, the more insulting the comments (the actual quality of the channel means little). And there is absolutely no reason to believe that so-called “anonymous” users are worse than the others. It’s a cultural trend to be insulting online. The name behind the login matters little. Google should have noticed that already, except that in YouTube most people do not have a real name as their account. So that’s perhaps where their experience with “insulting and abusive comments” comes from?

There is no way to “enforce” people NOT to be insulting online. There used to be something called Netiquette — a few forums and very. very few social platforms still enforce them: be polite, or get kicked out. This used to be the pillar upon which the Internet was founded: anonymity or pseudonymity was allowed — often encouraged, as typing “a/s/l” was usually enough to get you kicked out of a social environment enforcing Netiquette strictly — but insulting behaviour was not. (One of the nice things about Second Life is that griefers, trolls, and generally abusive people are still routinely kicked out — even if they come back later with a new account, they can be kicked out again and again, until they give up and go insulting people… on YouTube :)

So perhaps Google is tackling this from a stereotypical perspective, believing that “nice people” always use “their real names”. If they think that, I wonder where they have been in the past decade or so: anyone with the least experience with the Internet should have a pretty good idea of how people behave in it. Larry Page is a child of the USENET and IRC days — he ought to know what it means to be under Netiquette, and what to do with abusive people. He also knows very well that “real names” mattered little (if at all) on the USENET, IRC, or other early forms of social networking. I can believe that he has had little time for participating on online communities since launching Google, but… surely he has hired some “social networking consultants” that are, in fact, familiar with the Internet at all?

This is definitely putting the emphasis on the completely wrong idea.

I applaud “getting rid of insulting people” on the Internet in general: I’m a girl of the Netiquette age. As recently as 2005, I still gave occasional seminars on Netiquette; in 1995, by contrast, learning Netiquette was almost mandatory, and I used to do Netiquette training sessions for corporations just starting to join the Internet: the purpose was to teach new Internet users how to behave properly on the ‘net, lest their email addresses started getting blocked (that really happened back in 1995!): what people learned in my classes is that the Internet was a marvellous technology for communication, where freedom of speech and expression were unrestricted; privacy, anonymity, and pseudoyimity were a granted right; but where politeness, as a form of social interaction, was not only encouraged but actively enforced.

As we “lost respect” of the Netiquette (ironically, it’s still a RFC — and that means that each and every person or network connected to the Internet is supposed to follow all RFCs or risk exclusion!), we became to be more and more subject to “pollution” in the content we find on social networking sites: it resembles more and more a huge kindergarten where no adult is present to oversee what the kids are doing. That’s not surprising: most people are very low on the scale of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, meaning that they require active enforcement to behave properly, or revert to their basic childish instincts — there is nothing we can do about that. We can teach people how to read and write, but that doesn’t make them morally more responsible :) Kohlberg might remain a polemic author, but at least his research has been based on real samples of real people, back in 1958.

The thing that grates most on my nerves on this whole issue is that Google is making “assumptions” (linking “pseudonyms” to “unruly behaviour” and “comment pollution”) without any sort of data collection or analysis, but merely based upon a perceived (and erroneous) “feeling” of someone up the hierarchy. It’s almost ridiculous to see how one of the largest profile-gathering companies in the world apparently ignores their own profiling data and just defends a decision based on “feeling”. Google can certainly sponsor peer-reviewed scientific assessment of their data to find some conclusions that pass the test of academic scrutiny. But perhaps such rigorous data analysis proves the opposite of what they wish to know, and that’s why they resort to “feelings” and “opinions”.

My whole issue is that Google allowed me to join their vast network of services, encouraged me to upload a lot of content (on Google Docs) and even profit from it, via AdSense. They have my real name, address, VAT# and bank account number on record — I’m fine with all that. Now they change the rules and wish me to reveal publicly pretty much everything in order to continue to do business with them. In some countries (like my own!) this is basically fraud: allowing users to join a service based on false assumptions, and then change the rules for joining in the middle of the game. That’s a no-no. Sadly, the US allow that all the time. I’d be fine if Google separated the two issues. For example, on YouTube, you can either behave as a jerk, or you can be in good standing, follow the rules, and join their Affiliate/Partner Programme and make some money out of the videos you publish. The choice is the user’s. That makes sense to me: Google doesn’t want to have “jerks” making money, and that’s a very good way of actually “enforcing” Netiquette via a monetary incentive. But by tying together all their services under a single account and a single ToS, it means that previous legitimate users — and I certainly consider myself one of them, I’ve been even an early adopter of Gmail — are now flagged as “rude criminals” just because their policies have changed. That’s cheating and subverting the game in the middle of the play, and I denounce that strategy as being fraudulent.

My whole issue is that I might be able to get my Google Profile back under the new rules. Might. But what happens if I’m unlucky and get an idiot at Google who flags it as unappropriate and wipes my account? There is no real “appeal” inside Google; Google is a private corporation and, as such, their “rules” work outside the legal system (i.e. no protection, unless Google does something criminal to you). They can take all your money if they wish and are not even required to give you any compensation. You lose the right to sue them. They’re not liable if they kick you out under their ToS. So that’s a huge dilemma for the likes of me: should I risk to activate my Profile and G+ again, and face loss of business and of data if a stupid Google employee doesn’t like me, or should I remain hidden in silence, refusing to use G+? (I never used Buzz or Orkut either)

This is a strange world, where paying customers have absolutely zero rights.

I found you on Google+ when it went public; I found the link to this article there as well.

Like many others I vastly prefer Google+ to Facebook but my circles are in the double or triple digits. That said, I like the “circles” and I feel less coerced by Google policies than Facebook. That feeling is rapidly fading as I learn more about Google and their evolving practices/policies but if privacy is dead at least make it prettier…and psychologically I’m more comfortable without having to call people “friends” just because I know them. That may seem petty but it my understanding that Facebook adopted the varying degrees of association based on Google+ circles.

Anyway, thanks for doing what you do, your writing is always thought-provoking.

@Jillian

“…they can advertise to a user based on the user’s posted content, interests, plusses, etc.”

Sure, but they can do so much more effectively using a single name across multiple contexts — especially when it happens to be the same one under which you do, for example, all your financial transactions — rather than a variety of unlinked pseudonyms.

“Your supposed reasoning doesn’t actually explain why they’d allow me to hide under Jane Doe but not JaneDoe42582.”

The main reason for allowing fake real names and not obvious handles is that the former are much less likely to actually be used. Before the spy-on-your-customer real names movement began its current sweep through the online corporate world, when someone could choose any pseudonym, it was considered way cooler to use a customized nom de plume versus a fake real name which likely already belongs to a number of people anyway. This remains true today.