I'll concede they're a small but loud group of users. I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential.

I would attribute Google+'s failures much more to their abysmal launch strategy, which massively restricted otherwise-excited users from ever joining Google+ until it became a barren wasteland.

But, Google+ showed that they were incredibly influential. The real-name policy was the primary narrative about Google+. Feminist bloggers complained it would expose women to stalkers and abusive ex's. Journalists wrote about the underlying racism of the algorithm assuming Anglo-Saxon naming conventions and highlighted people barred from the service for having names from a different ethnic or cultural background. Techies wrote about privacy and big brother.

The end result was every article about Google+ carried with it some form of controversy, negativity or problem. Joe average might not care about the real name policy at first, but they do care when they're told it's broken, sexist, racist and dangerous.

Perhaps I'm misremembering how the Google+ story unfolded, but I wouldn't exactly call feminist bloggers the most influential. They're loud and often make PR waves (the dickwolves incident comes to mind), but I don't think that's what killed Google+ (PA is still going strong). If what the tech community thought was incredibly influential, no one would be using Facebook or Snapchat due to privacy concerns (comments that so-often get brought up on Hacker News).

I'm not saying the real name policy didn't hurt Google+. I'm sure it did, but I think it could have weathered that storm if it wasn't weak in much more important areas like their launch strategy.

> I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential.

Or worth being influenced by…

Any time you use your real name, real HR or potential employer sees what you did. I do not want my chance to find work be influenced by random HRs opinions on what google play games I rated or which youtube videos I have in playlist. Nothing really controversial there, but people tend to be judgmental about details.

Forcing me to use real name means that I suddenly must be super careful about everything and control everything the same way as I control work. Not worth it.

Yeah, and Google+ launched at around the same time this issue was already getting quite a lot of negative attention, including in the mainstream press and media as I recall.

I think pseudonym policy depend heavily on what we set as 'average'. My parents and their work relations use their real name everytime, for everything, I never saw them use a pseudonym and they scorn me for using silly or unscrutable names.

On the other end my siblings, cousins, school friends and some more all kept their AOL/hotmail/yahoo mail or other chat service nickname, which for a reason or another was a nickname.

I think it really depends on how, when and for what someone first came to the internet. If it was for fart jokes, or activism, real name policy is a bummer.