... why? Why do I care if I have a G+ account? That's the mistake.
Give everybody a free G+ and then never ever bother anybody about it if they don't use it. The mistake was making G+ obtrusive.
Well, and conflating the concept of "comment" and "share" in Gootube.
And making the "real names only" thing universal instead of a rule that users can enforce on people they interact with ("I don't want pseudonymous commenters").
And forcing me to pick a profile every time I go to YouTube (leave that until I start commenting/posting stuff, thanks).
Yeah,they totally went overboard. The last time I tried to check my G+, they had a dialog asking me for more personal information and wouldn't let me get past it. I closed the window and have not gone back to it since. I was once a supporter of G+ (since I really think facebook needs competition) but I'll likely never try it again.
Exactly. No public posts? No public profile. Mention to the user that they're doing something "profile-oriented" that's going to start appearing on their profile if you really want to do the silly "activity-log" approach to a home-page (that is, every YouTube video or Blogger post the user likes and comments appears on their page) - once the user starts doing actions in public, that's the time to lazily create the public page, and that's the time to ask the user the hard question of "hey, I'm going to start collecting all your public commentary and public likes into a single place so everybody can see the stuff you say and like, is this good? yes? Awesome. No? Let me set up a pseudonym for you to do that"
Google obviously wanted people who were active public commenters/contributors on their properties (YouTube, Picasa, and Blogger) to automagically be part of Plus, and that's not a terrible idea (obviously treating commenting and sharing as the exact same operation without distinguishing it to the reader is a terrible idea, but that's just a detail). But why foist Plus on all the lurkers? Lurkers don't add value to Plus anyways.
This is how I feel about comment-voting systems and the universal up-vote/down-vote rule. I don't want information hidden from me just because some unknown majority has deemed it to be disagreeable.
I think the perfect comment-voting system would include a feature whereby comments could be filtered and sorted for me based on the up/down/sideways votes of users who I typically trust and agree with (which is based on my own up/down/sideways votes on their comments) and including that user's network of trust, to a diminishing degree.
Give everybody a free G+ and then never ever bother anybody about it if they don't use it. The mistake was making G+ obtrusive.
Well, and conflating the concept of "comment" and "share" in Gootube.
And making the "real names only" thing universal instead of a rule that users can enforce on people they interact with ("I don't want pseudonymous commenters").
And forcing me to pick a profile every time I go to YouTube (leave that until I start commenting/posting stuff, thanks).