I,too, see fanatics in this thread and many others. They produce no cost-benefit analysis of G+ YT integration, use loaded language, provide anecdotal evidence and appeal to emotions.
Making vague statements about this topic and some of the people who care about it, isn't an analysis of any kind, either, or an excuse to dismiss the valid points being raised by others. And saying it's such a cesspool that the issue is irrelevant either way is not exactly contributing to the discussion, is it.
I honestly cannot come up with a single benefit of this; I mentioned some costs I see and so have others, lots more eloquently. And anecdotes do matter because this is about people and large scale effects on billions of individual lives. You can't measure or calculate any of this exactly; you have to listen to individual stories and apply your own experience, there is no shortcut.
Not caring is one thing, but it's quite another to openly proclaim that one cares so little, that they just might have to take a break from HN for a week until this terrible infection (surely 4chan must be behind it, it can't have anything to do with when Google made the change) simmers down, but not without asking others why they care, as if they hadn't already stated why.
>They produce no cost-benefit analysis of G+ YT integration
What? Few of us work at Google. We don't have the numbers. And even if we did, we can't predict what the outcome of the backlash and bad PR will be. Maybe it will be like the times people got upset at Facebook, which didn't really change much[1]. Maybe it will be like when people got upset at Digg and it basically killed the site.
I don't see people getting particularly emotional here. I'm not sure you know what emotional looks like. This is emotional: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs (Note: she managed to get her issues fixed in the end)
[1] I would note that the Facebook privacy issues were things that didn't really affect 99% of users, for most people the information that leaked didn't matter and the people probably didn't notice. The YouTube situation is a bit different because as well as the privacy concerns (which I think alone wouldn't be enough to have any lasting impact) there is also the fact that the switch over was completely bungled and has resulted in people turning off comments on their videos because the new system has so many problems: hugely long comments, allowing outside links, ranking comments based on how much response they get (i.e. moving trolls to the top).
>Yep, you for one, didn't provide any cost-benefit analysis of YT G+ integration in this discussion, concentrating only on the negative outcomes.
I feel like I'm repeating myself here (and perhaps this is a point that Googlers will never grasp, 42 shades of blue and all that) but many things can't meaningfully be expressed as a cost-benefit analysis. In this case, if you had asked me before the switch to come up with a cost benefit analysis (assuming I worked at Google and had the data) I could probably have come up with some figures, but the size of the errors would have been so huge as to make the exercise pointless.
Are you arguing that people sat in Google and seriously believed they were able to accurately quantify the cost of a huge raft of negative articles across the mainstream media and a bunch of the most popular users of the site shutting off their comments or leaving the site? (Assuming they even predicted the possibility of that happening). I just don't believe anybody can put a cost on that in advance. If that is really how decisions are made in Google then it is hardly surprising that their brand is so damaged.
Throwing around numbers is easy. It doesn't make the numbers right or relevant.
