[jsnell]

That's a ridiculous and paranoid claim, bordering on tinfoil hat territory. There are plenty of practical reasons for why you'd want an online service to be tied to real identities. Reasons that a business would actually care about.

Which isn't to say that real names are necessarily the best choice. There are of course other reasons to be somewhere else on the continuum, like real identities with some freedom of presentation like nicknames, full pseudonymous identities, or full anonymity.

[lukesandberg]

I think what google is trying to prevent is not dissenting opinion but rather things like the fact that 80% of newt gingriches twitter followers being fake. They want to create a community based on honesty and real world identities. if you need to post something anonymously on the internet, there are plenty of ways to do that. For instance googles blogger TOS doesn't disallow pseudonyms. So if you need to publish anonymously then maybe G+ just isn't the place to do it.

Real names is obviously a tricky policy to enforce but there is value in it. I think that eventually the policies and enforcement will converge on a better solution. This is probably one of the reasons G+ is still in field trial.

[timwiseman]

They want to create a community based on honesty

Often the best way to get an honest opinion is to gauruntee anonymity, not remove it.

[lukesandberg]

That is one way to do it, but it is also a way for conversation to devolve (youtube comment threads?). So it is a balance. While anonymity may allow some people more freedom to express themselves in a positive way, it also makes it easier for people to express themselves in a negative way that may be considered harmful as well.

[revscat]

Western governments have a long history of shutting down dissenting opinion, infiltrating left-wing groups, and conducting various other undemocratic operations in order to further their own goals. And just yesterday the PM of Great Britain called for government controls over social networks. Google's motives here are questionable given their cozy relationship with US intelligence and law enforcement.

This is hardly "tinfoil hat territory". Rather it is simple history and current events.

[mc32]

Can you elaborate on the 'Western' qualifier, I think it's unwarranted? I imagine any big enough and sophisticated (organized) enough government would engage in some of this activity.

[revscat]

I included it because a large segment of Americans seem to discount, ignore, or refuse to accept the validity of such things. I agree with you. NPR, unfortunately, does not.

[mc32]

Ah, ok. I recall a conversation with a SEAsian refugee who mentioned something like neighborhood committees and such where neighbors were organized to actively spy on such things which could be regarded as anti-state/anti-party.

[sixtofour]

Sounds like East Germany.

[noduerme]

I've lived in Vietnam and can confirm this is still policy. All over the country, every area (say, 6-8 city blocks from what I could tell) has a "Block warden" who's in charge of making sure everyone's political views are in line within their sphere. Most of these guys drive mercedes-benzes now and their kids spend most of the day playing videogames and blasting bad music off oversized speakers from the middle of the block warden's compound -- which itself is usually a large modern house with very high walls. No one sees what goes on in there, but the music starts blasting off those speakers at 6:30 AM sharp, six days a week, and if you're Vietnamese your ass is out of bed and washing the street in front of your shop by 7.

Google is trying to establish an online version of this kind of total collective obedience. And this, right after they admit to the German gov't that they've shared European data collected off their cloud servers with the US intelligence services? Seriously? Screw them to hell.

[nirvana]

I think accusing someone of "bordering on tinfoil hat territory" is essentially a personal attack. You claim there are plenty of practical reasons, but you didn't list any. I can think of some, but none that are appropriate for a social network.

Think about it this way- would you exclude Mark Twain from your shelves if you ran a book store? Sure, you could say he's being dishonest by not posting under his real name, but he's part of a long tradition of people doing so, and for good reason, including those who published political pamphlets around the time of the american revolution.

There is also a very long history, continuing right up until the present day in many countries, of persecuting people for their dissenting opinions. Thus the comment you're replying to is not out of line-- it is a primary reason to use a pseudonym. And it is a real threat in countries like North Korea, Iran, etc.

Further, given the public statements from the US Federal Government ranging from branding anyone who has served in the military as a "potential terrorist" and the revelations of programs and software to correlate identities using social networks to "find terrorists", the threat even in the USA is not out of the realm of the reasonable.

In fact, if Google were being forced to engage in domestic spying- spying that might otherwise be thwarted by using an alias that prevents correlation- we are all familiar with the fact that they could be barred from even revealing it, given the recent penchant for secret court orders and "national security letters", and the provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

So, there's a slate of practical reasons-- though quite unsavory- to tie your online identity to your real name.

[jsnell]

> I think accusing someone of "bordering on tinfoil hat territory" is essentially a personal attack.

I was talking about the claim, not the person. I'm sorry for expressing it in a way that could easily be construed as a personal attack, that was in no way my intent. I still think that it's a totally ridiculous idea.

Google doesn't have any obvious motivation for wanting to suppress dissent. Google does have a motivation for making a popular social network that can supplement their other products, and hopefully be a profitable business sometime in the future. You suggest that the motivation might be a secret US government order, and it is pretty sad when that is the most plausible theory.

It's one thing for the government to force the handover of some data. It's totally another for them to be secretly controlling the minutiae of R&D at a company all the way from the secret inception of the project...

Additionally a "real name" policy will in practice be a "real-looking name" policy, and thus not all that useful for censorship. If you use the pseudonym Mike Johnson or Steve Smith, how likely do you think it's that Google would be checking your identity? Is there any evidence at all that people with some political views are being singled out for id checks.

> You claim there are plenty of practical reasons, but you didn't list any. I can think of some, but none that are appropriate for a social network.

Well, the biggie for a social network would be that there's empirical evidence that social networks using real names seem to be more successful, and more useful. Nobody ever got fired for copying Facebook.

Using real names means that people who know you by your real name can easily find you. The network is less likely to be run over by novelty / joke / abusive accounts. People will in general behave better than when being pseudo- or anonymous. All of this will translate to better user experience and engagement for a large group of people.

So if you want to create a product with mainstream appeal it seems totally reasonable from a business perspective to go somewhere near closer to the real identity end of the spectrum. No sinister conspiracy needed.

Maybe some of these reasons are fallacious, either for everyone or small niches of people. It doesn't matter; all that's needed is for the people in charge to believe that they're valid for 95% of the people, and it'd still lead to the same decision being made.

> Thus the comment you're replying to is not out of line-- it is a primary reason to use a pseudonym. And it is a real threat in countries like North Korea, Iran, etc.

It might be a reason to use the pseudonym, but that in no way implies that wanting to prevent that is the main reason to forbid pseudonyms.

[nirvana]

Claims aren't accused of wearing tinfoil hats, people are. When you say a claim is the kind that comes from that kind of person, you're implying that the maker of the claim is that kind of person. You are correct that you strictly talked about the claim, but this was an inflammatory way to put it, and personally offensive to me. (I really do wear a tinfoil hat, under doctors orders!)

Seriously, though, I can't speak to your intent, and I'm not trying to argue with you (in fact, you can have the last word... ) its just that this particular phrase is commonly used in an attempt to discredit people and communicates a world view that is anti-intellectual and anti-critical thinking. (EG: "You disagree with government propaganda? Well put on your tinfoil hat!")

Strictly speaking, I think what he said was incorrect. I believe it is correct that suppression of dissent is the primary reason most "hipsters" (not sure what the right word is there to describe this segment of the population) want to prevent using pseudonyms. I don't think it is google's reason. And there's a big difference between "primary reason" and "only reason".

However, invoking the tinfoil hat, at best is a fallacy ("People who say that are crazy, therefore the argument is false") and at worse it takes the conversation to a personal level that his simple over broad statement didn't really merit.

Probably way too many words on that subject, but I wanted you to understand why it is an offensive thing to say.