You're missing 50% of the picture here. Anonymous, unmoderated discussion in an uneducated crowd is the worst of both worlds. Obviously.
But anonymous, moderated discussion in a forum of disciplined and/or informed, educated users is better than the same discussion in a forum where all the identities of the participants are known, precisely for the reasons fat0wl outlined. You can look to any of the heavily moderated reddit communities for a great demonstration of this (AskScience, /r/sex, /r/fitness etc). Even cherry-picking the good parts of 4chan will make it blatantly obvious that anonymity, in a controlled setting, is a very good thing for the level of discourse.
The comment quality on many of these forums far surpass anything that you will see on politically correct Facebook, which is the opposite end of the spectrum: Most people, apart from a few loudmouths, will be exceedingly polite and well-behaved when all their friends are watching. And this leads to poor debate and boring discussion.
Even on Hacker News, I would refuse to contribute if I had to post with my full name. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is simply that I do not wish future employers to be a Google search away from a detailed record of all my personal, political and professional opinions. This is simply a reflection on the fact that the reality of public discourse has changed in the world of search engines. Anonymity (pseudonymity) and moderation is the only way to resolve this problem.
In short, Google has the complete wrong idea. Which is actually quite shocking; Google should know better than anyone the realities of public discourse on the Internet.
"Google should know better than anyone the realities of public discourse on the Internet."
Google wants to extract the most money possible from each HTTP request. Knowing how to bill you (credit card, cell number, etc.) is a really good way of doing that.
Personally I think the problem is the concept of comments in the first place. You see, way back in the day, if you wanted to respond to a post or whatever on the web you went to your own website and posted a response and linked to the source you were responding to. Comments sections on websites are data islands; comments and conversations held captive in walled gardens. Youtube is the biggest irony of all as it has the concept of video responses, yet they prefer you to respond in tiny teeny little comment boxes. I say scrap the comments section and prove a big red "record a video response" button next to each video.
Of course I appreciate the irony of my comment about comments appearing on a site with comments, but I've always regarded sites like hacker news and slashdot as "forums where the post is a link to an article".
I'd much prefer it if everyone has a wordpress site or equivalent and posted their opinions on that. At least the web would be more webby and you wouldn't have greedy centralised sites gobbling up content and demanding control of the conversation.
"way back in the day, if you wanted to respond to a post or whatever on the web you went to your own website and posted a response and linked to the source you were responding to."
Amen. I still do it this way most of the time. Too bad the Web has not standardized on a form of pingback - that would allow these distributed conversations to actually work. Right now we're stuck with looking at our referrer logs, and that is very clumsy.
I keep asking this question and getting no response, so I'll ask it again:
Is there any evidence that any site anywhere has seen an uptick in comment quality by requiring real names?
Anecdotally, any time I see a news website with Facebook Connect the comments are still swill. While I'd be willing to consider evidence to the contrary, I think this is a false correlation. Observing that anonymous comment threads tend to have more swill than social network threads says nothing. People act more like they would in real life on Facebook because Facebook has always tried to tie your online identity with your meatspace identity. Slapping real names on YouTube accounts makes them easier to stalk, and possibly easier to humiliate outside of the site, but it doesn't stop them from being a conglomerate of barely-literate human beings who are strangers to almost everybody and will rarely interact with each other more than once.
> The problem is that anonymity leading to great conversation is disproved by reality.
How ironic that you are posting this on Hacker News.
Or pick reddit for another flagrant counter example to your claim.
Uncivilized discussions don't happen because of anonymity but because of uncivilized people. Create forums where mature people are inclined to participate and you will get great discussions, whether these posts are authored by anonymous people or not.
> Create forums where mature people are inclined to participate and you will get great discussions, whether these posts are authored by anonymous people or not
No doubt that works well in some cases, but the average YouTube video is not such a forum.
Google has a problem ("The comment section on many YouTube videos is an insane cesspool"), and they need to address that problem. They don't really have the option of just moving the goalposts.
Moderation is another option that can work, but it may not be practical with something as enormous as YouTube.
They certainly could have done a better job of this, because the reaction is fairly predictable (people go insane over far more minor changes... OMG-CHANGE!1!), but it doesn't seem an unreasonable move in the abstract.
> No doubt that works well in some cases, but the average YouTube video is not such a forum.
Yes, and that's the mistake that Google is making: thinking the problem is procedural ("Just have people log in with their real name") instead of social.
I'm not sure what the best solution is but their current one is obviously wrong. Maybe they could start by doing a better job at sorting/upvoting/downvoting so that only the best comments get shown on the front page and not the most recent ones.
If anything, at best this has left the comment quality unchanged. Now you have people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp.
Personally I don't think YT comments, for all their vulgarity and chaos, required any "solution". They were cesspools, but ultimately cesspools of humanity. There is absolutely no reason one couldn't ignore them if they found them so distressing.
yea they were fun to look at if you were looking for a possible laugh but really -- what do you expect from a single public chronological thread on a (possibly dumb to begin with) video viewed by millions?
if they were so desperate to give it value why not just make it display based on some algorithm (top comments or some hacker news-ish setup). they approached it in a completely uninspired way. Violating everyones privacy is not some dream solution. it seems more like "Plan D"....
> people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp.
I have to say I've been amused at the people exploiting the combo of "no character limit" and "collapse button at the end of the post" by tacking public domain novels on the end of innocent-seeming posts.
Did you notice that if you get a notification about a video, and then click the notification to watch it, the video continues to play in that dinky little notifications feed taking up like 1/5th of the screen at most?
Did you notice that if you change your layout to single-column, the column is the exact same width as each column was in the two-column layout?
I use G+ for one community. I regularly can't find that community from the main page and have to type its name in the search box.
I can't talk about the new Gmail interface because I swore that off a long time ago.
If you don't want to watch the video, the gist is that the G+ integration is actually highlighting the worst comments and putting them at the top, since they are the ones that get the most replies/likes/dislikes (feeding the trolls, etc.).
Has the quality of the comments gone up? No. Now, they are giving people who don't mind bullying people under their own name access to people that dare to call them out on their shitty behavior.
Edit: is the quality of the comments on sites like 9gag or those others that use the facebook comment system better than that of youtube that they should've felt inspired to make this move? Is it less racist,misogynistic or less of any kind of hate towards anyone?
This move, though short sighted and ill advised, is precisely to combat the cluster fuck that is YouTube comments powered by anonymity.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but one look at the quality of anonymous unmodderated comments calls for one.