In a blog post published today titled "Everything in its right place," Google acknowledged that forcing its users into Google+ was a bad idea. The company said it will no longer require Google+ accounts to use any of its products, and it will continue to strip Google+ integration out of all of its products. "It doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use," the company said.
The next product to be de-plussified is YouTube. The YouTube blog announced that "in the coming weeks," comments will no longer require Google+; as of today, comments made on YouTube won't show up on Google+, and vice-versa. Google also says that in the future, YouTube users will be able to delete the Google+ accounts they were forced to make, without losing any data. (Don't do that right now because you will lose data.)
YouTube's Google+ integration was almost universally disliked by users. It led to an influx of spam, and many of the site's popular personalities came out against the new comment system. To this day, some popular channels still have comments disabled altogether. The cofounder of YouTube even came out against the system, asking, "Why the f*** do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?"
So far, we've seen Google strip Google+ out of Gmail, Search, the navigation bar, Photos, Hangouts, and the service has dumped its real name policy. With YouTube integration out the window next, there really isn't too much of Google+ left in the other Google products.
