YouTube Wants To Show Your Real Name

It’s a ballsy move for YouTube to make, have everyone show their real name in comments instead of being anonymous. Anonymity has caused YouTube comments to just be a cesspool of the worst hate filled, racist and terrible use of the English (I’m sure other languages also) language you can ever imagine. Don’t even get me started on top comments.

For a while now you were able to create a YouTube account without an actual username but your name instead. It was weird seeing them, especially when they had space in them and the URL’s were not pretty. I don’t really know how I feel about that. If I go to a website and it doesn’t have pretty URL’s, either usernames or allows you to choose like Facebook, I feel like it’s taking a step back. Like how Google+ doesn’t have them yet. It’s just weird to me.

On a June 29th blog post, YouTube told the world about this feature. It uses your Google+ profile name and YouTube will allow you to review your content, including comments to hide from the public. That’s cool I guess. They are also kind of promoting it like: a few years back you chose sparklymuffins69 as a username and you may be a little more mature now. So would you like to show your name from your Google+ account? One issue, if you do choose this, your username is still going to be sparklymuffins69 and people will see that in the URL.

Right now YouTube is letting you opt-out but look for this to be required in the future. The big question we all want to know, will this eliminate tone down the terrible comments that currently populate YouTube? For now, I still have my username as default and will probably keep it that way until I’m forced into change because I am a REBEL!