Trapped in Google+

I went to reply to a YouTube comment and it asked for a Google+ account. I didn’t have one. Didn’t want one. There was no decline option.

Google had decided Google+ was going to happen and YouTube was the lever. Sign up or your comments get posted under a name Google assigned you. It was the kind of plan that only gets approved when nobody in the room actually uses YouTube.

Jawed Karim, who’d actually built YouTube, complained about it. Emma Blackery made a mocking song. Francis explained how the moderation fell apart completely—trolls could impersonate anyone while real users got shadowbanned. Everyone could see it was worse, not better.

That’s when YouTube stopped feeling like something I was using and started feeling like something being done to me. The comments section had always been a mess, but it was a genuine mess. This felt processed, filtered, owned.

I never signed up for Google+. I just stopped commenting on YouTube, like a lot of other people did.