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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Google Hell. I have described my experience here http://blog.foundrs.com/2010/11/15/the-10-step-google-login-... (the 10-step login from hell).

I never wanted to have a gmail account. But to use a certain service, years ago, Google required that I create a gmail account. So I did. Then someone invited me to a Google Apps project, so I got another email there. Then YouTube decided to merge my login info with Google. It's been more than 5 years, and now I have 6 accounts with Google, and it's been hell ever since. It did get better this year as Google started better supporting merging and multiple accounts.

Don't blame the user. I never wanted this to happen to me.

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Note: Google does NOT support merging accounts.

I've had a similar experiences.

The Youtube merge was a disaster causing many Gmail addresses to be merged with "nicknamed" Youtube channels that users didn't want anymore. Since Google refuses to step in and delete accounts or unlink them, many people are stuck with a Youtube account nickname they don't want to be associated with. This got even worse over the last few weeks as Google now automatically logs you into Youtube.

The Google Apps/Full Google Account so called "merge" never actually merged anything, it just created 2 full Google Account, a new one under your domain email, and the old one still active under a modified version of the your email address.

Google has no reason why they can't unlink, merge, or rename accounts/usernames. I'm convinced that almost every single person in the world has 2 or more Google accounts.

Google Hell is right.

YouTube hell gets even better if you signed up for Google Apps in a country where YouTube isn't officially "launched" (what does that even mean?), like Austria.

My google apps account currently has a YouTube account associated with it that causes an error message to replace the current page if I do anything on that site while logged in as that apps account. Like a video, get redirected to a white page saying something went wrong. My solution now is to only log into google apps via Fluid/Mailplane or anonymous Chrome windows.

Whoever engineered this mess should go take a swim in a volcano.

YouTube insisted I login in order to watch some movie trailer, so I did so with my gmail account. It then insisted that I give a nickname. I didn't care at the time, as I figured I could just change the name later - surely the only unique ID here is my gmail account. And that's why my YouTube name is skadfjlsakdfjlksdfjl.

Ha!

I'm upvoting you because I did almost exactly the same thing in that situation... my YouTube name is lalalalalalalala2334.

and mine "thisloginprocesssux"

As jack of all trades I admin the Google Apps account for our company. Recently (believe September or October was the cutoff) Google Apps accounts became full Google Accounts. Before that, you could have different accounts with the same email and possibly password, but being very different accounts. In the process, they merged your Google App Account and the Google Account for your Google App email into one. It worked quite well, but was very confusing and sometimes spit out errors. I've got all four of us moved over, and having Google App account being a Google Account is much more logical.

I experienced something similar, and eventually gave up because I got stuck in an endless loop -- and as a consequence I had to give up using that google service. Since there was no way to contact Google about this matter I blamed myself: I thought I was the only one on Earth stupid enough to get in this situation and that the other 6.9 billion people get along with Google fine. But since then I've read more stories like these, and I'm glad I'm not the only one anymore.

I have a Google Apps account + an older GMail that I use for receiving spam.

And when Google Plus launched, because it wasn't available for Google Apps users, I refused to subscribe using my regular Gmail account, as I could see another instance of Google Hell from miles away. What's interesting is that whenever I bitched about Google Plus not being available for Google Apps, people would tell me that Google Apps support ain't needed and that I should just use a Gmail account.

So really, I also blame users. If not enough users are bitching, Google doesn't have the incentive to change this accounts hell.

> Am I Human? Clearly, YouTube is not.

That about sums it up. ;-)

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