If you don't like someone's name, you don't have to circle them, and you can always block them if they insist on commenting on your public posts (which they probably won't be doing anyway).

(Oh, and if they are spam, please report them as spam: Google cares a lot about ridding spam, and that is an entirely separate issue from "starpony76".)

Every single thread I read at G+ would be filled with their names, its not my public posts I'm worried about -- it quite possibly destroys the value of everyone elses public posts for me. There would be no escape from it, I am not going to block every SEO EXPERT XChange, Mr Piddles, Big Johnson, L33tB0Y username that would innundate every well known and heavily followed G+ user. I'll just get annoyed instead.

I am not comparing the trauma of tasteless names everywhere to being stalked -- but it would quite possible keep me from wanting to use the site. Along with a lot of other people. Which also has the effect of causing the person you are talking about not wanting to use it, either.

Any name you want was allowed for Buzz, and was certainly a turn off.

Is this a common complaint about Twitter? I have never heard this as the reason someone won't use Twitter: the argument seems to come from a minority of users who come out of the woodwork to back services like Google+ during issues like this.

(In essence, I find it interesting that you chose to pull Buzz as your first-line example, despite the fact that Buzz failed for all kinds of other reasons against a competitor that seems to have no trouble with an "any name goes" policy.)

I don't know what a common complaint is against Twitter. But Google+ shares Buzzes stream/comment structure exactly -- in that comments on a post are heavily highlighted and constantly thrust in front of you. I don't just follow X, I follow X+ whoever comments on his posts, and my stream is very highly reactive to those comments.

Twitter does not work like G+ does. G+ does however work exactly like Buzz does in this respect (for public posts).

I consider myself a fairly regular guy, and yes the naming (among other things, but the ridiculous names of people I'm not following, specifically) annoyed me to no end on Buzz. So yes, considering G+ is a Buzz clone when it comes to public posts and comments -- it will annoy me on G+, and I assume I'm not alone.

Buzz is the most perfect first-line example that exists.

For accuracy, do you mean "whomever comments on posts you comment on"? As far as I've been able to tell, comments on posts you do not "have any stake in" do not appear on your stream.

Perhaps you are thinking of notifications, they behave as you describe. I am talking about my stream, or someone elses stream of posts, or a post as a unit. The comments ride along with all of them, in their entirety. They may be in some state of partial collapse, but they are always there.

Looking at my stream, by screen space the comments generally occupy about 1/3 as much real estate as the parent post. On posts I've never interacted with.

This is by design obviously -- and when the comments are good, its great. When the comments are bad, its bad. Time will tell whether G+ ends up with the type of community that can support this very in your face community intensive model.

I actually find twitter names to be fairly annoying. I've never actually voiced that opinion though since the facebook sharing model seems useful and the twitter sharing model always seemed useless to me (the only actual use I have ever been aware of is that some publishers use it as a worse RSS feed). The <140 character messages from people I don't really know are a sizable portion of Facebook, and are always by far the worst part of it.

Pseudonym vs actual name is correlated to that spectrum but not a direct relationship. People's stupid names is definitely something that makes interactions on reddit, AIM, video games, twitter, etc feel really immature to me compared to Facebook.

This problem was solved by Biz on Twitter when they stopped showing you @replies to people if you don't follow the person replying.