[Produce]

So the Google ecosystem was a bad idea after all. I knew it. First they lure you in with a slick web mail client and a couple of gigabytes of storage. Then they buy up a bunch of companies, including YouTube. Then they link your Google and YouTube accounts together. And now your Google identity is suddenly your YouTube identity which is linked to your real name. I didn't ask or sign up for the vast majority of this!

[jkn]

I don't really use YouTube so I can't say, but is there anything preventing you from keeping separate accounts on Gmail and YouTube, something that makes it less convenient than if these websites were run independently of one another?

[pi18n]

It seems that Google will log you in across all of their services if you log into one. So to use separate names, you would have to be logging in and out whenever you switch services.