Well, this is a bit akward. But it has been bothering me for quite a while.
I was just browsing through Old School RPG Planet (which is a great thing to have again) and ended up at Beyond Google Plus, and Fixing the Internet, which Melan wrote back in october when the Google Plus shutdown was announced. Good points are being made, and I fully share the distaste for Google and Facebook (and also Apple) permanently trying to monopolize internet communication for the sole purpose of making money by tracing as much of our activities as possible.
I would have liked to just give that old post a simple “Yeah, you’re right!” to give my appreciation, but I ran into my old bane again that has constantly been getting in my way for the last half year or so. When you click on “Select profile…”, there is only one option to pick from:
Google Account.
No! If my only choices are to use a Google Account or don’t comment, then I don’t comment. I think in this day and age, I don’t even have to explain why. We all know very well what Google wants and Google does. It didn’t used to be that way, with Google Account just being one options among many on almost all sites. But at some point, I believe last year, the majority of blogspot sites seemed to have all other options removed at the same time. I kind of suspect that Google made that change quietly for all users and you now have to opt-in to allow people to comment in any other ways.
I think comments are a very neat feature and a great thing to have, since we are really interested in sharing ideas and not just shouting into the void. But there is only so much I am willing to give to Google by choice, and somewhere you have to draw the line. And I think I am not the only one who does. So if you are using blogspot, please check if your comments are restricted to Google Accounts and consider whether you want to enable other options. If you don’t want to, that’s your choice, but given that this changed happened so suddenly everywhere at once, I believe that most people don’t even know the settings were changed without their knowledge.
I agree, and I handle it the same way, and it’s sad. I’ve been floating around this OSR thing for a lot of years but my comments are so scarce I doubt you can find them with a search, because I’m not going to link some other account to them- or in my case, create that account as I have neither a google nor a facebook and I won’t.