YouTube's comment threads were the toilet of the Internet. Google+ will hopefully be the toilet brush.
A chorus of butthurt misanthropes are ranting right now about YouTube forcing everybody to attach Google+ identities to their comments, and I watch their whining with glee. There is no human right to be a total jerk with no accountability, and I can't think of any reasonable YouTube comment you could actually make that wouldn't hurt to have a more persistent kind of identity connected to it.
Clearly, the old system wasn't working at all. Among mainstream, family-friendly Internet services, YouTube has always been an outlier for years with its savage, miserable, and ugly comment threads. Pretty much any popular video is guaranteed to devolve into gross homophobic and racist slurs. It's been a weird Frankenstein creature, with the friendly face of a popular TV host but the spleen and gonads of a 4Chan /b/tard. It needed to be cleaned up, really badly.
I believe in freedom of speech, but not freedom from responsibility for speech, and that's what effortless anonymity gives you. (Notice I'm saying 'effortless' anonymity, not all pseudonymity.) You should have the right to express unpopular views, but you should also have to stand up for them. Allowing effortless anonymity lets people dish out fire without having to take it in return. If you can't attach some kind of identity to your viewpoint (with a few critical exceptions), then you should probably re-examine your commitment to that viewpoint.
Yes, there are reasons you may need to be totally anonymous on the Internet. Whenever this anonymity debate comes up, anonymity advocates trot out the usual weary, wartorn array of dissidents, whistleblowers, and gay teenagers. They're absolutely right that all of those people need safe places and safe ways to speak.
But it's not like this is a wholesale Hoovering of anonymity out of YouTube. Want to create a pseudonymous YouTube account to do your gay dissident whistleblowing? Just open a free Gmail and Google+ account under a fake name. I just did this. It took me five minutes. Then I posted a pseudonymous comment on YouTube. It's not rocket science.
Google+ has an uneasy relationship with handles, but Google+ Chief Architect Yonatan Zunger said the company doesn't care if you're using a fake name. 'In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is 'your' name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this,' he posted on (of course) Google+. Most people post on Google+ under their real names, but that's a good thing. They're standing up for their views.
This move creates just a little bit of friction between commenters and their comments. Rather than being able to effortlessly shout ' S**TCOCK' at a moment's notice, commenters who are about to do something shameful have to jump through a hoop or two and maybe switch Google accounts, during which moment hopefully the 'U R A FAGIT' part of their brain will get distracted by another part of their brain, perhaps the one that wants Doritos or needs to pee.
That said, Google hasn't implemented its new commenting system well. There's a bunch of tweaks it needs to make. Allowing unlimited length comments and hyperlinks within comments are very bad ideas; they encourage spam, phishing and obscene ASCII art. A system of bubbling popular comments up to the top spotlights controversial comments rather than the highest-quality comments. Slashdot figured that part out a decade ago with its karma system, which builds an excellent, self-policing community.
Ideally, Google would let you attach any of a range of online identities to your commenting account, just as Disqus and many other cross-site discussion systems do. Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft accounts provide the same friction as a Google+ account does. As we've seen on Facebook, attaching a persistent, widespread identity to a comment doesn't prevent people from being awful. It isn't a silver bullet. But it cuts down on the phenomenon a bit.
The time for frictionless anonymous commenting is over. It should be over. It doesn't bring anything good to the table. Google+ is better than nothing, so bring it on.
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