It is even more irritating with Youtube. If I am logged in to any Google account it pesters me to select my Real name every time I watch a video. And every time I end up opening the video in another browser.
I 100% feel you on this! I have actually just closed out my tabs in frustration and did not watch any videos. The thing that really pissed me off was the wording, they intentionally make it really ambiguous so that you can screw up. Eeverytime i choose an option, i am just hoping that it is not to use my real name, i find that really sleazy. My youtube viewing has also decreased by about 80% because the new home page is too cluttered and the recommendations are just so off, if you make the mistake to watch a 60sec video of something silly, be prepared to get a whole lot of recommendations for that crap. This is actually the main reason why in the last two months my viewing has dropped so much, it doesn't even seem like they take into account my saved lists, favorites or watch later.
Bonus complaint: Lately I have been feeling that google just doesn't care or they have too much going on to pay attention to detail. I have been really disappointed with their social products as well as services since google checkout. I downloaded the google now app a while ago and was shocked at how it killed my battery and never used it again, yesterday I decided to test it out, a few hours later I wanted to use instagram but my power was at 3%, I smiled and just disabled the app. This disregard for winning at both the first & second moment of truth is what is killing google's ability to diversify their revenue from just search.
everytime i choose an option, i am just hoping that it is not to use my real name, i find that really sleazy.
This. So much this.
I have not yet received any email asking me to upload a photo of myself, but the constant pestering while watching Youtube, and with shady, ambiguous options happens everyday now.
The sad thing is nothing beats YT for video right now.
I've actually kind of fell into the habit of using two browsers. One that I keep logged in to my Google account and one that I never log in with. If I want to do something "Googley" that I want tracked, like watch YouTube videos in my subscriptions or check my G+ page, I use the Google account browser (Firefox). If I'm just browsing my various forums and random links and videos and whatever I don't want associated with my Google persona, I use the non-Google account browser (Opera).
It ends up working pretty well, though I guess it is more hassle than it needs to be.
Or you can use the same browser with multifox. Ctr-alt-M, and you're anonymous / a different person. Very iseful for web development. Chrome has a built in equivalent.
I take it a step further I use vmware to run a different instance of windows and go through a proxy. Paranoid? yes! but let Google track that particular me and not the real me.
Twitter is far worse. I didn't use it except for maybe two or three times a year when I want to check something someone has said and (has I have at least 5 times!) tweet someone. When I login briefly I then have several weeks of crappy emails and badgering from twitter. It is incessant. X just retweeted a message from Y! I have hit all the don't-email-me-ever buttons, but every damn time they do it. I just accept it now as don't login ever.
I signed up for a second Facebook account because of pressure at work to "like" our company page but I didn't want my main profile linked with where I work. I liked the page and never signed back in. I get constant emails from Facebook "Do you know these [5] people?". They're all people I know in real life and am friends with on my main profile (which is kind of creepy, my second profile has no friends), of course I'm not going to friend them again.
If Facebook is smart enough to know that my second account is from the same person as my first account, how are they not smart enough to know I'm not going to friend my friends twice?
For this reason I have my Google account sequestered into its own browser (Safari). I never log in from my main browser (Firefox). I do the same with Facebook, which I only visit from Chrome.
The best part about that horrible dialog is that I have to lie to it to make it go away. I'm okay with using my real name but I am NOT going to make a G+ profile to be allowed to use youtube.
Especially in the chance it starts publishing anything about my youtube usage.
As I recently discovered, having a youtube account is synonymous with having a youtube 'channel'. And if you use the 'favorites' feature of the youtube mobile apps while logged in (thinking, perhaps innocently: "how convenient to save this video I was emailed until later, when I have a larger screen available.") you may be interested to know those favorites are displayed on your publicly-accessible channel page by default.
What about making it sod off for good. If I wanted to use my real name to watch cat videos and subscribe to gaming feeds it's likely I would have bloody well done so in the first place.
In part I assume at some point google wants to start putting this on my google profile automatically. Olive watched "Kitty Corliss, grinding the crack" for the 87th time today. See what has them so hooked[linku]
Google seems to have started on a mission to annoy the fuck out of me the past 6 months or so. For instance through the neverending popups and dialogs that enthusiastically tell me about some feature and require a response from me to ask them to please fuck off.
Not to talk about the amazingly stupid animations on Google+ that makes it impossible to scroll fast on an iPhone 4. I was making an effort to use Google+ more ... and then Google gives me that shit.
Look Googlers, I know that you suffered under the reign of the Cupcake Princess and were unable to release anything cool because dealing with her was more painful than watching an entire episode of Sex and the City. I know that. But that doesn't mean you have to go out of your fucking way to add frivolous, pointless, wankery to your UIs.
If you want to do something productive: fix the Gmail UI.
OK, I'm not usually like this -- perhaps this time is just because I didn't know who the "cupcake princess" is and had to Google it out of curiosity, and trust me, I think Google is the epitome of the power hungry, sinister, duplicitous corporation, that makes the robber barons look like no more than slightly annoyed kindergarten teachers -- but I think you're being sexist.
Anyway, I found this: "Mayer, a long-time Google executive dubbed the “cupcake princess” after she constructed detailed spreadsheets weighing up the benefits of various cupcake recipes". Now, compiling cupcake spreadsheets, is, uhhh, frivolous maybe? But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male executives at software companies do the same for beer; or bikes; or Star Wars. I don't think they get such nicknames.
Anyway, there's an unpleasant bro scent to your comment. If we care about our freedom and independent agency, the Google corporation must be broken up, and sooner rather than later. But even the largest heap of banal evil in the known universe can be dealt with without unnecessary bigotry.
There was someone who was (is?) running a spreadsheet in which they attempted to "drink it all" - that is, try every possible drink in the microkitchens. Then they rated them.
I'd say "guess the gender", but given the company, you probably already know the answer.
The remark was not intended to be sexist. It was intended to reflect that I don't think Mayer was particularly easy to work with, that her elitist values were contrary to much of the Google culture.
(That being said: I think she is good CEO material. In fact, when she took over Yahoo! I bought stock in the company).
If you really can't imagine that it wasn't a sexist remark then I'm sorry for you: it must be hard to be so easily offended.
Things have really been getting out of hand here, lately it seems almost anything that even has the faintest trace of 'usually being associated with female gender' is interpreted as being sexist. Some people have been taking the good Samaritan attitude a little too far I think, are we supposed to restrict everything we say to gender-neutral language or what?
It is absolutely sexist. It is meant to marginalize Mayer because she was analytical about recipes, despite the fact that we're all often analytical about a lot of ridiculous things. Ridiculous claims that it just coincidentally referred to her as a "princess" about "cupcakes" innocently shouldn't pass the smell test of anyone smart enough to navigate to HN.
Really the whole comment you replied to is just bellicose noise, and it's unfortunate that HN would be a place where that would sit as a top comment. Though I suppose in some way it's a selectivity bias because everyone with a grudge about Google+ (predominately people who don't use it, as an aside, but who seem to feel really passionate about not using it, though I suppose the same happens among many non-Facebookers) is highly likely to look at this submission.
I don't get what's so weird about making a spreadsheet as part of the recipe refining process. I've made lots of recipe spreadsheets. Honestly, I don't know how you'd track the large number of variations required to make a great recipe without a spreadsheet.
I understand where you are coming from but we really need to focus on the bigger picture. Let us all just get back to hating Google for being the most evil company that has ever existed and live in peace.
Veering dangerously close to sexist behavior there—make an extra effort to think about what you're saying when you talk about women in our field. Regardless of what you think of her, it's demeaning to reduce her from a CEO on par with any male in the industry to a "Cupcake Princess"—LOL, they aren't qualified to lead!
Seriously, though, don't be a douchebag, there are more than enough in our industry without this shit leaking onto HN.
You imply that we can't speak ill of Marissa Mayer because she is a woman. I've had the misfortune of finding myself in several meetings with her to experience first hand that she wasn't a very good VP. Or a very nice person. Or even embodying Google values.
On the other hand, I do believe in her as a CEO. I think she is precisely the kind of CEO material Yahoo! needs. I don't think she is VP material. The day Marissa Mayer took over as CEO I sold my Amazon stock and bought Yahoo! stock. And I don't even like her.
Now, you, on the other hand, reduce Marissa Mayer to a gender. Someone weak that needs to be protected and treated with care in comment fields.
I'd like to stop using GMail, but there aren't worthy competitors (free, large, mostly reliable). My ISP (which is a major one) sucks at mail compared to Google.
If you fast-forward the evolution of the GMail interface it is like watching a drab green Jeep being turned into a chromed Jeepney. Complete with three tiers of honking-subsystems, 18kW worth of blinkenlights and a whole dash full of Virgin Mary bobble heads.
But mind you: the rims on the thing have a carefully selected hue of blue that was found among 39 others to be the one hue that gave the best ct rate on ads, so it isn't like the process was random or anything.
I have a very simple test for product usability: it must not confuse the hell out of my parents. Gmail makes my parents shot profanities at the computer. Test failed.
(Okay, there I probably managed to offend at least one ethnic group, one religion and I said something that is almost certainly ageist. Feel free to be offended while I shall busy myself not giving a fuck)
I waited 2 hours for an email yesterday only to find it hidden in a new "Promotions" tab instead of my inbox, which meant it didn't get pushed to my phone for some reason.
FastMail isn't free, which is a plus in my book (clear business model not involving ads). It is comparable or better than Gmail in all the other ways that matter to me. See my post for more details.
Not sure what Marissa Mayer has to do with this. But please don't blame an entire company for the decisions of a single person: Vic Gundotra.
There's plenty of engineers at Google who feel incredibly frustrated every time one of these decisions is made and remember the good ol' times when Google used to put the user first.
The remark pointed to the impression that when Mayer left the floodgates opened and lots of UX changes happened.
She had been holding things back -- for good and bad. It was very hard to get new things done while she was the gatekeeper for UX. There were a lot of things that didn't work too well when it came to the process of developing the user experience. A big part of which, as far as I could tell, was Mayer's inability to conduct UI reviews in a meaningful manner. I was present at a few of them. It was like attending a meeting being presided over by the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Sadly you wouldn't find many people willing to speak up about it, because that could potentially be Very Bad For Your Career within Google. So people would just tolerate her childish, spoilt behavior.
The good thing was that very little frivolous nonsense was shipped. The bad thing was very few positive changes were made as well.
So when Mayer was "reallocated" (and eventually resigned) there was all this pent up frustration and pressure to get work done on UX. And I think the pendulum swung a bit too far in the other direction because of it.
In the beginning most of the changes that came out were incredibly positive. For instance I think the overall look of Gmail and the move to a flatter overall design was a good thing.
But eventually things started to go a bit pear-shaped. For instance I have no idea what made the Google+ people think that the mad scrolling animations was a good idea. I can't imagine how it enhances the experience, and if you are on a smart phone, it is a really slow way of flicking through your feed. Slow is not a Google value. Google products should never be slow.
In Google+ I wish they would have focused on usability rather than embellishments. For instance: why the hell is it so awkward to start a hangout on Google+? Why is the UI for this so fucked that it takes people a dozen uses to learn how to do it without mousing around for ages? Seriously, if I were the PM for that product I'd nail down fixing that problem as the top OKR for the next two quarters and focus on getting just that done. Hangouts is the single most useful feature Google+ offers, and the key thing that differentiates it from Facebook; yet the user experience for getting a hangout going between a group of people is fiddly.
Haha, I find the ads annoying as well. Sometimes I just want to go read my email and it's a full page ad for some Google product like Wave or Google features I don't want.
Product people will think "once every 2 weeks is fine, since we really want to get profile pictures for everyone". Dev guy implements it. Customer complaints. Product people review it, and exponential backoff emailing is implemented.
I dropped Google+ for this exact reason. I refuse to support a platform that I didn't use when the parent company shuts down the platforms I do. My next phone will likely be Firefox os. I've started using duck duck go. Funny how this obvious information gathering and shameless promotion of what they're clearly no good at has ccompletely soured me to their brand.
I wonder if this trend will increase. Moving from Chrome to Firefox and Google to DuckDuckGo for me was first about a bad taste left by a brand. That led me to alternatives that are more user focused and actually listening to users. I think Google kind of lost its way. I doubt if a majority of users though even care or value the issues which cause some of us to jump ship. The identity service of G+ was the first straw for me. I'm sure others are accumulating their own straws. I guess it shows that any company can jump in and fill a niche offered by bigger players. DDG is getting well deserved publicity. It's also nice to see Mozilla in the news again. I'm quite happy making the product switches I have and will put up with any perceived reduction of features for products that are improving and really listening to their users.
This is probably one of my largest complaints about a google product at the moment. It feels like they're trying to trick me in to doing it with that invasive pop-up I get every week.
I don't even use YouTube for uploading or commenting, but I also don't want my real name and a photo of me on that site in any form. There's always the small chance they'll do something stupid like roll an update that makes my "previously viewed videos" available to my "social connections" by default without notifying me.
IIRC YouTube has presented me with 3 completely different iterations of that dialog, all trying to bamboozle me in to G+ing it up.
The latest one was in fact blatantly wrong because the two answer choices began with "Yes, do ..." and "No, do ...", which didn't make sense because the question was posed in the opposite way.
It really used to be so nice until Google got their grubby hands on it. Nowadays I can barely get through a single video without massive stalling issues, or 30 second ads for a 10 second video. It's ridiculous.
The massive stalling issues are probably a result of your ISP. I know that Comcast massively throttles YT video downloads after the first thirty seconds or so of the video have been downloaded. (I've verified this by directly downloading a particular video file at home, and at a Uni across the continent. The download at the Uni downloaded at maximum speed until the rather long video was downloaded.)
And they keep telling me to update my cover photo (not via email though), but the new cover photos are so big that most of the users need to scroll down to see my name. A horrible user experience.
Do you actually use G+? Because when you go to someone's profile it starts scrolled down on the picture so you're at the profile pic/name/basic info. You can then scroll up to see the rest of the cover photo if you want.
Edit: This is on Chrome, so if it doesn't work like that on other browsers it's most likely a bug.
Yes it's scrolled down when you visit a profile that is not your own. It just goes to show the picture shouldn't be that big in the first place it's just wasted bandwidth...
just re-visited my google+ profile to see what the cover photo stuff was all about, and yeah, it's big. the bigger issue is, that scrolling on the profile page feels sluggish and jumpy (on my mac book air 2013 - latest stable chrome browser). google seems to have some serious issue on that one.
Why do you think Google has bad so much trouble delivering a product that is enjoyable to use in Google+? I understand the market saturation from Facebook, but something about Google+ is off. It should be a much better user experience.
It'd also be really nice if, every time I logged in, I wasn't prompted to tell them if there is "someone special in my life." Really? Is relationship status that critical?
I know that those notifications are annoying, especially when they get mixed up with important e-mail and send you scrambling for your phone, however...
How 'bout you just set a profile photo? It doesn't need to be your face, doesn't even need to be photo. Actually, a distinct avatar would probably work better than a photo.
But put something there. It's tiresome to try to follow a conversation without an easy way to distinguish participants.
So fire up GIMP, put your initials over your favourite shade of pink and upload it to Twitter/Google+/GitHub/Gravatar/whatever. Or pick a picture from Flickr with a permissive license.
Readit News
Bonus complaint: Lately I have been feeling that google just doesn't care or they have too much going on to pay attention to detail. I have been really disappointed with their social products as well as services since google checkout. I downloaded the google now app a while ago and was shocked at how it killed my battery and never used it again, yesterday I decided to test it out, a few hours later I wanted to use instagram but my power was at 3%, I smiled and just disabled the app. This disregard for winning at both the first & second moment of truth is what is killing google's ability to diversify their revenue from just search.
This. So much this.
I have not yet received any email asking me to upload a photo of myself, but the constant pestering while watching Youtube, and with shady, ambiguous options happens everyday now.
The sad thing is nothing beats YT for video right now.
It ends up working pretty well, though I guess it is more hassle than it needs to be.
If you opt-out of every e-mail type, they just add more e-mail types and automatically opt you in - check the settings again.
I find this behaviour somehow more dishonest than the others.
Just untick everything. Super simple (unlike, say, Facebook).
If Facebook is smart enough to know that my second account is from the same person as my first account, how are they not smart enough to know I'm not going to friend my friends twice?
Especially in the chance it starts publishing anything about my youtube usage.
In part I assume at some point google wants to start putting this on my google profile automatically. Olive watched "Kitty Corliss, grinding the crack" for the 87th time today. See what has them so hooked[linku]
Not to talk about the amazingly stupid animations on Google+ that makes it impossible to scroll fast on an iPhone 4. I was making an effort to use Google+ more ... and then Google gives me that shit.
Look Googlers, I know that you suffered under the reign of the Cupcake Princess and were unable to release anything cool because dealing with her was more painful than watching an entire episode of Sex and the City. I know that. But that doesn't mean you have to go out of your fucking way to add frivolous, pointless, wankery to your UIs.
If you want to do something productive: fix the Gmail UI.
Anyway, I found this: "Mayer, a long-time Google executive dubbed the “cupcake princess” after she constructed detailed spreadsheets weighing up the benefits of various cupcake recipes". Now, compiling cupcake spreadsheets, is, uhhh, frivolous maybe? But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male executives at software companies do the same for beer; or bikes; or Star Wars. I don't think they get such nicknames.
Anyway, there's an unpleasant bro scent to your comment. If we care about our freedom and independent agency, the Google corporation must be broken up, and sooner rather than later. But even the largest heap of banal evil in the known universe can be dealt with without unnecessary bigotry.
I'd say "guess the gender", but given the company, you probably already know the answer.
(That being said: I think she is good CEO material. In fact, when she took over Yahoo! I bought stock in the company).
If you really can't imagine that it wasn't a sexist remark then I'm sorry for you: it must be hard to be so easily offended.
Things have really been getting out of hand here, lately it seems almost anything that even has the faintest trace of 'usually being associated with female gender' is interpreted as being sexist. Some people have been taking the good Samaritan attitude a little too far I think, are we supposed to restrict everything we say to gender-neutral language or what?
Really the whole comment you replied to is just bellicose noise, and it's unfortunate that HN would be a place where that would sit as a top comment. Though I suppose in some way it's a selectivity bias because everyone with a grudge about Google+ (predominately people who don't use it, as an aside, but who seem to feel really passionate about not using it, though I suppose the same happens among many non-Facebookers) is highly likely to look at this submission.
Veering dangerously close to sexist behavior there—make an extra effort to think about what you're saying when you talk about women in our field. Regardless of what you think of her, it's demeaning to reduce her from a CEO on par with any male in the industry to a "Cupcake Princess"—LOL, they aren't qualified to lead!
Seriously, though, don't be a douchebag, there are more than enough in our industry without this shit leaking onto HN.
On the other hand, I do believe in her as a CEO. I think she is precisely the kind of CEO material Yahoo! needs. I don't think she is VP material. The day Marissa Mayer took over as CEO I sold my Amazon stock and bought Yahoo! stock. And I don't even like her.
Now, you, on the other hand, reduce Marissa Mayer to a gender. Someone weak that needs to be protected and treated with care in comment fields.
Precisely who is the sexist here?
They just tried recently.
I'd like to stop using GMail, but there aren't worthy competitors (free, large, mostly reliable). My ISP (which is a major one) sucks at mail compared to Google.
But mind you: the rims on the thing have a carefully selected hue of blue that was found among 39 others to be the one hue that gave the best ct rate on ads, so it isn't like the process was random or anything.
I have a very simple test for product usability: it must not confuse the hell out of my parents. Gmail makes my parents shot profanities at the computer. Test failed.
(Okay, there I probably managed to offend at least one ethnic group, one religion and I said something that is almost certainly ageist. Feel free to be offended while I shall busy myself not giving a fuck)
I waited 2 hours for an email yesterday only to find it hidden in a new "Promotions" tab instead of my inbox, which meant it didn't get pushed to my phone for some reason.
I wrote this a few days ago...it spent some time on the front page here at HN: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/
FastMail isn't free, which is a plus in my book (clear business model not involving ads). It is comparable or better than Gmail in all the other ways that matter to me. See my post for more details.
There's plenty of engineers at Google who feel incredibly frustrated every time one of these decisions is made and remember the good ol' times when Google used to put the user first.
She had been holding things back -- for good and bad. It was very hard to get new things done while she was the gatekeeper for UX. There were a lot of things that didn't work too well when it came to the process of developing the user experience. A big part of which, as far as I could tell, was Mayer's inability to conduct UI reviews in a meaningful manner. I was present at a few of them. It was like attending a meeting being presided over by the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Sadly you wouldn't find many people willing to speak up about it, because that could potentially be Very Bad For Your Career within Google. So people would just tolerate her childish, spoilt behavior.
The good thing was that very little frivolous nonsense was shipped. The bad thing was very few positive changes were made as well.
So when Mayer was "reallocated" (and eventually resigned) there was all this pent up frustration and pressure to get work done on UX. And I think the pendulum swung a bit too far in the other direction because of it.
In the beginning most of the changes that came out were incredibly positive. For instance I think the overall look of Gmail and the move to a flatter overall design was a good thing.
But eventually things started to go a bit pear-shaped. For instance I have no idea what made the Google+ people think that the mad scrolling animations was a good idea. I can't imagine how it enhances the experience, and if you are on a smart phone, it is a really slow way of flicking through your feed. Slow is not a Google value. Google products should never be slow.
In Google+ I wish they would have focused on usability rather than embellishments. For instance: why the hell is it so awkward to start a hangout on Google+? Why is the UI for this so fucked that it takes people a dozen uses to learn how to do it without mousing around for ages? Seriously, if I were the PM for that product I'd nail down fixing that problem as the top OKR for the next two quarters and focus on getting just that done. Hangouts is the single most useful feature Google+ offers, and the key thing that differentiates it from Facebook; yet the user experience for getting a hangout going between a group of people is fiddly.
(som of us where enthusiastic google fanboys earlier.)
- Yes
- Remind me in a week
How about: don't bug me ever?
I don't even use YouTube for uploading or commenting, but I also don't want my real name and a photo of me on that site in any form. There's always the small chance they'll do something stupid like roll an update that makes my "previously viewed videos" available to my "social connections" by default without notifying me.
The latest one was in fact blatantly wrong because the two answer choices began with "Yes, do ..." and "No, do ...", which didn't make sense because the question was posed in the opposite way.
It really used to be so nice until Google got their grubby hands on it. Nowadays I can barely get through a single video without massive stalling issues, or 30 second ads for a 10 second video. It's ridiculous.
[download, download, download!]
Actually laughed at that one.
Edit: This is on Chrome, so if it doesn't work like that on other browsers it's most likely a bug.
Deleted Comment
How 'bout you just set a profile photo? It doesn't need to be your face, doesn't even need to be photo. Actually, a distinct avatar would probably work better than a photo.
But put something there. It's tiresome to try to follow a conversation without an easy way to distinguish participants.
So fire up GIMP, put your initials over your favourite shade of pink and upload it to Twitter/Google+/GitHub/Gravatar/whatever. Or pick a picture from Flickr with a permissive license.
Don't punish others with a generic icon.
/PSA
Completely unnecessary ad hominem here.
(Really. Use HNSærch to take a look)