This is obviously a horrible user experience. She's right. Why would any user make the connection that deleting their Google+ account would delete their YouTube channel as well? It's not intuitive in the least and it shouldn't happen. But if it's just the way things have to be then they should have ample notifications that it's going to happen before you commit.
Please note: I am actually a huge fan of Google+. I posted this because it shows real world emotions based on design decisions that sometimes developers/UX people shrug off. I personally hope that someone here has the power to help this user (and correct the original design problem?).
I went to the Delete G+ account links in my Account Overview page. There are two links - Delete profile and Close account. Both of them clearly state what they do to their YouTube videos and associated profiles. The Delete profile link also only makes the videos private and deletes associated profile stuff.
If this person's videos were deleted even though the instructions say they don't, then it is a bug and then I agree - "Fuck Google Plus".
Otherwise this person has not bothered to read anything and this is pure false accusation and blame.
Is there any recourse for her? Because I have done this times too many, i join hangouts and then delete the G+ afterwards. I will be terrified if curated music playlists get removed from my YouTube channel.
It's the tail wagging the dog, really. Every now and again, Gmail wants me to join Google Plus while giving them:
- My real name
- My age (WHY THE FCUK REALLY?)
- My location
Why? So that they can broadcast all of this information on a Google Plus page. What a bunch of fools.
Google: I have no love for you. I like how Gmail and Google search work^. But no love or loyalty for you as a company. I will drop you as soon as someone better (or a workable out-of-the-box privately hosted solution) comes along.
^And you are pushing your luck with the new Gmail compose UI.
She's just lost a bunch of content that she worked hard to produce.
She's upset that the option labelled "Delete G+ content" also deleted, without warning, her YouTube channel. She had the YouTube channel before G+ existed.
It seems like a legitimate complaint. Since some people work hard on their YouTube content, and rely on it for their income (I have no idea if it's the case for that user) it's upsetting when Google fucks them over with weird unhelpful UI.
Google seems set on experimenting with fucking awful UI choices at the moment.
I hope they stop soon, and realise that you do not improve access to the world's information by shitty god-awful unhelpful user interfaces.
Google is crammed full of smart people who can design experiments and gather data. They also have a gajillion users. There's no excuse for the terrible state of the UI the Google puts out on some products.
I know there are some Googlers reading HN, so gentle apologies to them. But good grief, when people start saying they prefer the UI of Pegasus you should know you've gone horribly wrong somewhere.
So, she lost many hours of work, and the results of that work, and the views and comments attached to that work, and the chance to continue to monetise that work, and all of that loss happened because Google didn't have adequate warnings?
She can re-upload all the content, but she's lost all the comments and people are confused about why she's doing that and and and. I don't know where she is but uploading content can take ages.
I haven't seen her channel, but she speaks of 'building a brand'. She's obviously either making a living or attempting to make a living off her content.
It's not an over-reaction at all on her part. If you spent thousands of hours building a business and then destroyed all your efforts, you'd be pretty pissed too. And it's not enough to just have backups of the content. She had a following. It's way more time consuming to create a following than to create the content.
I sort of wanted to have your reaction, but while watching I felt her pain. She trusted cloud storage and got burned by a system without much fail-safety. The failure was partly hers if she didn't read the directions, but partly Google's for not at least putting up a warning before deleting YouTube videos. "Are you sure you want to delete YouTube content along with your Google+ account?" I read somewhere that Google wants people to stop thinking of YouTube as separate from Google+ (I wish I could remember where.) This seems like a harsh way to drive the lesson home.
