Actually, you have to provide your own entertainment. We tried the other thing and it was shit.

[hirez]

I think I am experimenting with how and if four (four!) slightly different social-meejah-wossnames can be made to play well together. I note that G+ and parent org appear to be making all the fuckups in the first month that it took LJ a decade to muddle through. That's either something clever to do with the accelerating nature of the 'plug-in

Comments

[stevenothing]

The twitlonger thing is different to the real names stuff on G+. If you enter an unreal name (a complex name, maybe, with an imaginary component) then you get your profile stuck in a state whereby you can't use it until you enter a real name. This means that you can't use Google products that require a profile: Google+ and, maybe, Picasa. Possible some other stuff, I'm not sure. This won't affect your gmail account, your youtube account, your blogger acount, etc. etc. No data is lost, all you have to do is change your name.

An account suspension, what appears to have happened with the twitlonger person (and I'm not familiar with the details) is something more severe, and for something more serious. No idea what, though.

Yeah, on the outside it looks pretty monolithic. I'm not sure there's a huge amount that can be done about that, and I wouldn't presume to state that something should be done, being a lowly aspie engineer and all that. That said, quite a few of the senior VPs, tech leads, product managers and the like are actively talking with people, in public, on these issues, so it's not totally opaque. For something as serious as account deletions though, you're unlikely to see much public discussion.

I'm not sure what I think of the real-name thing. When techcrunch went real-names with their facebook commenting system, the quality of comments increased significantly, although the volume decreased. It's since started to trend back towards the den of retards and trolls, though. So I'm... mostly indifferent.

[hirez]

That's... A somewhat sub-optimal design, minister.

(Says the chap with a name that blows up airline reservation systems, and there was some pisspot socially-socially site that threw a fit over the hyphen, which, while I'm prepared to forgive systems coded in the sixties when no-one had names like, I don't know, Alec Douglas-Home or Norman St. John-Stevas (nb: sarcasm) anything more recent that, oh, 1998 is on rather a sticky wicket.)

Now I have read this I am in favour of psuedonyms. Still not convinced about anonymity, mind.

[hirez]

(I should note that we are all assuming good faith here and not having an internet-strop. That would be rubbish.)