YouTube just FORCED me to say goodbye to my nick.
Youtube just FORCED me to say goodbye to the nick I've used for 27 years
when I went to save a video to one of my lists of fav videos. oO
It was 17 min interview, and halfway through I decided to save it to one of my lists, and the video STOPPED, covered by a great big dialog box saying I HAD to select how my real name was going to show, and not GIVING me an option back out of it! So, to continue watching the video, I HAD to say YES to their irresponsible FORCED CHANGE to a name NOBODY KNOWS ME BY! I kept looking for a defer-till-later option, but there wasn't one. There was ONLY a SAVE CHANGE option, which OF COURSE stripped away my KNOWN nick name in favor of a real name that is the same first and last as GAZILLIONS of other people have. Yes, I could have COMPLETELY QUIT OUT OF THE WINDOW (and thus the rest of the video), but without a doubt the NEXT TIME I tried to fav-list a video, they'd have forced this non-option option on me again. I hope key ppl eventually get FIRED over this! Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with ppl knowing my real name, provided that was shown, say, by MOUSING OVER my nick, but STRIPPING AWAY my known-by-many nick in some misguided attempt to "make people accountable" is just lunacy by ignoramuouses!
I was well aware for days, even weeks, that this change was being made, that YouTube users were being forced to get switcherooed to their real name only, as part of some damnfool, misguided, stop-the-trollers dickhead move, but I also gathered there WAS a way to get around it. Word was that while they'd made it HARD to not select Yes on this option, it wasn't impossible to get around it, but you had to look REALLY hard to find the right button to press to get out of the dialog with your settings left unchanged. But until today, I had NOT had the issue come up yet. I'd been saving videos to various favorite lists on my account all the time, and in fact placed at least one other there last night. But evidently the YouTube and/or Google techs must have decided to get even MORE aggressive with their insistence that you HAD to have your desired name forcibly ripped away from you, because now, simply by clicking the Add To button under the video was enough to garner the forced change.
I am not a happy camper. In fact, I am seriously pissed off.
I'm sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, this real-names-only policy is irresponsible. It is Google+ and YouTube, and other like-minded companies, giving a great big
fuck you to the culture that made the internet what it is today.
I have been following "
Nymwars" since its very beginning, since I am also known separately by an entirely different name I appear frequently on Second Life and other (OpenSim-based) virtual worlds by, with people who literally know me ONLY by that name, I have VERY GOOD reason to care about this issue, because when people are only allowed to be known on, say, Google+ by their real names, it makes it IMPOSSIBLE to know if any of those other people I might meet on Google+ who are clearly involved in virtual-worlds are people I know well under their SL names, or which one of those real-name people go with what SL names.
I continue to watch huge social networking companies like Facebook and Google+ continue down this path that is guaranteed to harm innocent people while at the same time
WILL NOT protect people against spammers and fakes and trolls, and that when South Korea actually mandated a similar real-names-only policy
by law it actually got
unanimously struck down by their Constitutional Court!
This real-name-only thing WILL, absolutely, come back to bite those mandating it in the behind down the road. I pray to God that sometime sooner rather than later (i.e. within
months, NOT years), they are forced to reverse this decision, publicly apologize for it, and that Google (and thus YouTube and Google+) then immediately give us ALL the option to go
back to using whatever the hell name we WANT to use and that we WERE using before they forced this deeply offensive and wrongheaded real-names-only policy down our throats. In fact, I'd be quite happy if everyone responsible for this real-names-only policy wound up being fired...
from the CEO down!
