When Google Poisoned Its Own Comment Section
The backlash against YouTube’s forced Google+ integration hit critical mass in November 2013, and the rollcall of objectors was starting to read like a comedy of the internet’s weird social strata. First Jawed Karim—actual YouTube co-founder, the guy in the elephant video—edited his channel description to ask why he needed a Google+ account to comment on his own website. Then Emma Blackery recorded a proper hate song about it, which felt appropriate. Then Francis—the kind of reliably opinionated nerd you follow precisely because he’ll say what everyone is already thinking—threw his two cents in.
His framing was perfect. Before the changes, sure, strangers called him fat. Rude, but direct. Under the new system, anyone with a Google account—including, he noted, people who had named themselves Adolf, Jesus, and Obama—could now bury his notifications in dicks and malware. An improvement by no metric. His suggestion: kick Google+ out entirely, bring Vimeo in as a partner instead, and let the comment section go back to being a normal kind of terrible rather than a structurally incentivized one.
He wasn’t wrong. Google eventually killed Google+ years later, after a data breach, and the forced YouTube integration died quietly with it. Sometimes the internet is slow to fix its own mistakes, but it does fix them.