http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUL_UK4hVgk

Watch that to get a basic idea of the shitty changes that have been made.

So yeah. Did you by any chance think that the changes done in the past half a year to Youtube were pointless, or perhaps trivial and stupid? Well, this one is gonna take the cake!

From now on, you gotta have a G+ account to comment on any Youtube videos. From now on, you gotta check any replies to your comments on... you guessed it! Google +, rather than, y'know, the INBOX? From now on, your gonna have to create a god damn G+ account to use Gmail!

So, this time, both the Creators of content AND people who watch it are getting fucked! All so Google can push their shitty social network so they can claim its actually relevant.

Fuck you Google. Your blatant spying on people, your censorship, your unethical corporate practices piss me off, but this takes the cake.

Wondering why doing a one-time sign up for a service you never have to use is in the same league as being spied on.

Yup, even their internet search engine got worse recently and iGoogle was closed. Before there was a bar where I could quickly switch search results between the search, youtube, translator and so on, now it's gone. They made it harder to use their own services >.>

http://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2 ... ivacy.html

Because that "One time sign up" puts your personal information on the internet in an easily searchable format. Because Google has stated in the past that it mines data to personally tailor ads to you.

Google is turning into Facebook, and becoming a social network is the part that I could care the least about.

The company has been trending towards erecting its walled garden, forcing users to use their Google Plus accounts for everything, ending XMPP federation earlier this year, and now requiring G+ accounts for commenting on Youtube. On a related note, Google's new Android is nonfree as in nonfreedom.

Anyone who sees this kind of behavior should recognize it as dangerous and antagonistic to an open and free (as in freedom) Internet, something that Google ostensibly supports. People who care should start migrating away from Google services, or the services of any other company that employs similar practices.

the problem is there wont be companies that we can go to that offer a competing product that is just as good.

all these companies are slowly migrating to an "internet ID" system where each user has one account for everything.

and whenever a company passes a certain size it will come under pressure from the entire industry to "help" push the internet towards a "1 account per person" system where our every action is tracked.

this is something that assholes in the government and recording industries have wanted for a very long time now, because it will make it harder for people to do things that the companies dont want them to do, and will make it MUCH easier for the government to track and spy on people who have accounts with those companies.

the people pushing this are the enemy. they are eliminating internet anonymity, internet freedom and internet privacy, and we cant do a single fucking thing about it.

we can stop legislation that assaults our freedom and privacy, but we cant do jack shit about a company deciding to change its products. all they have to do to completely violate ALL of our rights is just "tell" us about it in the EULA, which of course noone ever reads.

If you can't find a replacement, don't use any of them. At least for videos, vimeo is a solid competitor.

The continued use of a service certainly doesn't help.

Websites can provide legally-binding privacy policies that state that they won't do things with your ip address, like storing/logging it or selling the information to others. An IP address + browsing patterns (and the cookies that are likely stored in your browser) are enough to identify an individual, so it is very valid.

Google+ is a competitor to Facebook and other social networking services, and you can probably guess that they don't like to share user data. With more users using G+, Google will have more direct access to the lives of its users.

Making users use G+ to comment on Youtube videos will force them to take a look at it, and might spur some users to use the service, commenting on their Youtube comments/updates or something (I don't use Google Plus so I don't really know what you can do or what it tells you).

this is pretty much spot on.

as for youtube specifically, i'd say part of the reason they're forcing commenters to have G+ accounts is to clean up the youtube comments section, which is notoriously bad. legitimate G+ users will have their information tied to any comment they make, which will eliminate their anonymity and make it much easier for people who are pissed off at them to find out about them and harrass them over the internet.

it wont do a single thing to stop the people who wouldnt otherwise have G+ accounts.

all this will end up doing is punishing the people who already have G+ accounts

i've never commented on a single youtube video, and i've never had an account, so it wont affect me at all.

I actually removed my ability to see comments using a Google add on because I was sick and tired of making a small comment, and then getting a hundred "Die in a fire fucking faggot" comments. I mean...a comment saying how this is an interesting video shouldn't get that negative of a response?

Now, what they're doing is twofold. They're cutting down on bad responses from trolls that simply can't be assed to use a Google Plus account, and they're inviting more people to their social network. And as you guys say, this is somewhat bad for real Google Plus members.

It hurts the video makers too. A video maker who actually reads and replies to the comments on his or her video now needs to go through potentially millions of pages to actually figure out what is a comment and what is not, let alone reading the fucking comments. It serves no advantage to make the lives of the video makers more annoying.

Also, a general complaint...Google has been for months trying to get me to change my name on Youtube to my actual name among other really really personal stuff being made publicly available. They've done everything short of forcibly changing it. For the same reason there's the rule for SS, I don't like people knowing that much information. I mean, c'mon. This is beyond knowing someone's love life.