[mirzmaster]

> Many Google services employ commenting/voting/rating etc, handling these in different, separate siloed systems makes no sense.

Why doesn't that make sense? Is a YouTube user naturally a Google Drive user? A Gmail user naturally a Blogger user? This seems to only make sense to Google, and not their users.

I don't know how much overlap there was between YouTube users and Google account users, but Google merged the two simply to boost the profile of Google+. People who wanted to comment on YouTube videos with their Google+ pals and their real identities were already doing that -- on Google+. The forcing of Google+ on YouTube offered no discernible benefit to YouTube users that could not have been offered while maintaining YouTube as a distinct social network.

As a Google+ user, the utter disregard towards YouTube and its distinct identity severely annoyed me.