Google+ tinkers with their name policy

[firecat]

Emphasis on "tinkers"—they've made a change to their interface so you can display a third name (a "nickname") alongside your first-and-last-name, but you can't display the nickname by itself, so you can't be pseudonymous.

There's a long discussion of it here.

There are a number of comments by the author of the original post, Yonatan Zunger, a chief architect at Google, that make me bang my head on the desk repeatedly. I can't figure out a way to link to the comments directly, but here's one that particularly caused head-banging:

We thought this was going to be a huge deal: that people would behave very differently when they were and weren't going by their real names. After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not, in fact, the case. (And in particular, bastards are still bastards under their own names.

DUH!!!

Comments

I found this gem as well...

[chaos_by_design]

We definitely want to discourage sock puppets and throw-away accounts, but that isn't something you can really achieve via a names policy. It's a problem of the analysis of people's behavior, which is much more subtle. (And we are working on it, but I can't talk about details)

Seriously, wasn't the whole point of a "real name" policy to discourage things like sock puppets and throw-away accounts? And now they're admitting they can't stop it anyway?