Google+ ends name restrictions at last!
An end to #Nymwars at last! I would be rejoicing even more greatly were it not for all the people who've already been outed, or made so unwelcome they will never trust enough to return.
When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.
Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.
We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.
I know there are too many comments to read, but if you search the page for "Zunger" (Ctrl-F on most browsers), you will find reliable answers to frequently asked questions. Yonatan Zunger is a Google+ employee.
Crossposted from http://montuos.dreamwidth.org/934681.html ;
comments on original post. If you do not have a Dreamwidth ID and you want to read comments on protected posts there, you can log in with OpenID using your LJ ID.
When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.
Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.
We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.
I know there are too many comments to read, but if you search the page for "Zunger" (Ctrl-F on most browsers), you will find reliable answers to frequently asked questions. Yonatan Zunger is a Google+ employee.
Crossposted from http://montuos.dreamwidth.org/934681.html ;
comments on original post. If you do not have a Dreamwidth ID and you want to read comments on protected posts there, you can log in with OpenID using your LJ ID.