That's not fair. Most of them just have no self control, by whatever combination of genetics/upbringing/lack of willpower. When left alone, they go for immediate gratification and repeatedly make bad choices. When they have some arbitrary external system of control, like a fundamentalist religion, they're able to make positive choices. It allows them to be good. Call them stupid, maybe, but they're no more intrinsically good or bad than anyone else. They're just people.

Where they go wrong obviously is assuming that because liberalism doesn't work for them it can't work for anyone, and that no one can make positive choices unless they follow their religion. Trying to restrict other people's freedoms is bad. But someone recognizing that he's making a mess of his life and that forcing himself to live up to the rules of a religion would help him be a better person? I find that pretty commendable, provided he doesn't force his religious views on the rest of us.

Well, yes. My strategy for navigating online and my opinion of anonymity is obviously tailored to how I use the internet. But given that the article was about Google's new policy and that Google is solely about monetizing everyone's internet existence, I think my type of anonymity is relevant here.

To be honest, I don't care if youtube becomes a private little garden full of real names and politeness. I won't use it, but that's no loss. I was just pointing out that tools to accommodate both anonymity and moderation of trolls already exist on youtube and work well. If your video is meaningful to a number of people, you can open comments and trust them to moderate it. If your video is some fragment dissociated from context/community, you can manually approve comments, disable them, or rework your video so it makes a more lasting connection with its viewer-moderators. No one is entitled to universally positive responses, even the non-frivolous amongst us.

For what it's worth, I'm a pretty respectful person online and off. But I feel dehumanized by advertising, I see anonymity as the only defense against it, and I'd rather half the content on the internet be anonymous flame wars (minimized by moderation tools) than be required to post under my real name.

If you create something worthwhile and provide moderation tools, the anonymous community moderates itself. Works on slashdot, already works on youtube.

When I played in Goonfleet (Something Awful's Eve Online corp), I made a ridiculous little love song of a video and put it up on youtube. The corp is known for being really vile both to our enemies and to idiot members who try too hard, but the comments on the video are almost all positive/amusing. The few trolls who do post get quickly modded down by a handful of goons who like it enough to keep rewatching it and checking in years later.

By your and Google's reasoning, between my hard to please target audience and the anonymous commenting, I should've gotten a shitstorm. The fact that I didn't suggests that anonymity isn't youtube's problem, it's (1) a lack of a communal sense of ownership of most videos, probably due to (2) most videos being quickly produced one-off laughs, not being substantive enough to tap into or contribute to a community, and honestly deserving a lot of the the crap they get. But you put a hundred hours of effort into something and all the wonderful anonymous assholes on the Internet might surprise you.

Personally I will always choose anonymity online because I am a human being, not a consumer. I don't want to be marketed to every second of every day and I certainly don't want to help advertisers market to me better.

I've also been finding Amazon increasingly frustrating. To add one more gripe, why on earth does it default to making recommendations for me based on stuff I've bought off other people's wishlists? And why isn't there at least a universal setting to ignore wishlist purchases for recommendations? I've bought plenty of stuff for myself over the years but indulging my uncle's unfortunate love of Sarah Brightman has made Amazon's music recommendations useless.

Recently I've found myself missing the physicalness of bookstores. The good local ones have all gone under, so I've been keeping a list and visiting a store near my parents' vacation place whenever I'm up there. Getting recommendations from real people is fantastic, browsing semi-curated shelves for new (to me) books is a lot more productive than browsing unending pages online, and supporting a business that runs storytimes and craft projects and gets kids excited about reading is pretty satisfying. It does cost more than Amazon, but it's really worth it.

Also

Given that flea collars either do nothing or kill your pet, stores not carrying them is a great thing. Get a safe and effective flea prevention like Advantage/Advantix or Frontline instead. They cost more but they're worth it, too.

I agree that most people care more about the phone than its service, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. At least in the situation in the US, where all of the service providers seem equally mediocre.

Right now, I actively hate my phone for its horrifically clunky software and inability to sync with my computer's address book. It does have very nice battery life, excellent coverage, and has never dropped a call, but I still loathe the thing. I got it, (my first cell phone ever, a year and a half ago) because I wanted the least hideous phone I could find. But the service was almost irrelevant to my choice of phone; I ended up just getting a slightly less ugly than average model for the provider that most of my family and friends had. (I did listen to the sales rep who cautioned that one particular model was flimsy, but it was so ugly I wouldn't have bought it anyway. And if it had actually looked good, I would have ignored his advice and just been careful with the thing.)

In the past year I've pretty much given up on ever finding a decent-looking phone, but I've become adamant about finding decent software. Right now I'm desperately hoping that the latest iPhone rumors turn out to be true; at this point I'd pay a lot of money for a phone that just worked. I still would prefer a clamshell (I like having the main screen and keys protected) and it absolutely must fit in my pocket, but other than that I'll put up with anything. But it's still all about the phone itself for me; spotty coverage or poor customer service I'm ok with, but this evil abomination of a phone I'm not. The bad coverage and customer service I don't have to deal with everyday, but the phone I do.