Yesterday, Google posted to the official Google blog with a post titled Everything in its right place. The post goes on to explain how you will be able to use Google without Google+ and how Google+ will become a more focused product.
So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you’ll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. YouTube will be one of the first products to make this change, and you can learn more on their blog.
The YouTube blog followed up with some specific examples of the separation. Comments made on YouTube will no longer appear on Google+ and a Google+ page is no longer required to have a YouTube channel. I had my own frustrating experience with YouTube’s Google+ integration, so I and many others are happy to hear they are separating.
While YouTube tried to use Google+ with a goal of improving comments with a real name policy, they are addressing comment moderation in other ways.
- First off, we’ve improved the ranking system that reduces the visibility of junk comments. It’s working—the rate of dislikes on comments has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube.
- With today’s announcement from Google+, you’ll see more changes. The comments you make on YouTube will now appear only on YouTube, not also on Google+. And vice-versa. This starts rolling out today.
- Creators told us they liked the moderation options on their channels, like reviewing comments before they’re posted, blocking certain words, or auto-approving comments from certain fans. All this stays.
While it only affects my experience, I like the Hide Fedora extension for browsers to remove trolling comments.
We will continue to monitor Google’s progress on separating Google+ from their other products. It seems user feedback and stock prices are shaping some Google decisions.