YouTube Comments Get a Makeover From Google

[bigfatcarp93]

BECAUSE THIS IS SO NECESSARY, YES?

You know, being bought by Google might have been the worst thing ever to happen to Youtube.

 

[Easton Dark]

Great. Now I wont see those fucking idiotic spam bots that are like "check out this online game" or telling me how their sister's boyfriend makes 50000000 a fucking month over the internet, fuck those spams.

Guys in the comments here, please note that not everyone will dislike this.

Now all they need to do is resize everything, make SUBSCRIPTIONS APPEAR FIRST YOU IDIOTS, let me cache so I don't have to reload a thing I JUST WATCHED, and don't default me to 360p and I'll be completely happy with youtube again.

 

[Britishfan]

Huh. Great in theory (if there weren't 101 other better things for google to "fix" first) but for some reason I don't trust google to show me things I find relevant to the conversation and suspect that instead they will just show me things commented on the video that google wants me to see.

 

[Puzzlenaut]

Last year Google began asking YouTube users to use their Google+ accounts to log in to YouTube, linking the two accounts together and reducing anonymity.

And they've continued to ask, repeatedly, every couple of days, despite my declining the "offer".

oh god this drives me fucking crazy; I just don't log into youtube any more. Google really needs to understand that people don't want youtube for a social network, they literally just want to watch videos.


OT:
This whole plan of, as far as I can tell, giving peoples' comments weighting depending on their subscriber numbers, as well as "compatibility" (lol), seems like it will just be a case of the rich get richer. If Youtube worked as a social network -- if it had been built from the ground up that way -- then this could work; it would allow us to see the comments of friends and friends of friends. It hasn't and it doesn't, however, so I am sceptical.

Youtube doesn't have 'accounts', youtube has 'channels'.


Youtube comments are notoriously vitriolic, but youtube as a whole is a vitriolic place; a confusing hive of the internet with different types of people from comment section to comment section. What needs changing is:
A) Making sure we're aware of when someone has replied to our comment; this will encourage actual conversations rather than people commenting and leaving.
B) A decent notification system; noticeable, like facebook has. Stop sending me fucking emails!
C) A severe reduction in spambots and actual consequences for trolls and troublemakers. This is the only one of these three that is tough to implement, as there are already features in place and things still gets through. Do something though, please youtube!

 

[Jamous]

If this will prevent me reading the vast quantities of bile I find spewed across Youtube then I'm all for it...

 

[Breywood]

I guess I'm just too far behind the curve. Oh woe is me, a hopeless Luddite who doesn't understand how important it is to have a YouTube channel, Google+ and my Gmail account all merged together under my real name Breywood and have decided on more than two occasions to throw his hands up in the air and say "fuck it, why do I need all this trash? People need more place to write shit?" Oh Glorious Google, show me the path to enlightenment as to why all these options are necessary for me to finally become a shining example of a good citizen of Googopolis!

Because, you know, everyone uses their real name on their Google account, right?

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

God I hate Google.

They're taking THE WORST conversational place in the span of the internet and they've managed to make it less intuitive and throw in some lack of privacy for good measure.

Prismatic identities are one of the most important things the internet provides and this is just another step towards a boring, transparent pile of crap.
It's really too bad YouTube is the World of Warcraft of internet video sites. No matter how inferior it may be, it simply cannot be dethroned.

While I would agree with you any day, I cannot when it comes to YouTube. At least not without lying to myself.
I'm all for anonymity on the internet (thanks USA for Prism btw.), but the YouTube comment section is one of the places that actually suffer from it. There's a reason why it has its incredibly bad image and part of it comes from the fact that people can be the biggest assholes towards others without any consequences (in 99% of the cases).

I would argue that being an asshole without it being connected to your personality in real life is one of the sovereign rights of the internet.
Now, before you mention it, I'm not referring to the kind of stuff that can really hurt people. But a few insults can make a place far more interesting.

Even disregarding that, I think the YouTube comments being terrible has very little to do with anonymity.

Spoiler: This image pretty much sums it up

[image/]http://v.cdn.cad-comic.com/comics/cad-20100707-61471.jpg[/IMG]

Without relatively small groups and strict moderation like we have here on the Escapist, people are going to be dicks. Lack of anonymity doesn't prevent this. It just causes trouble.

The real reasons for the low quality of YouTube comments comes from a wide variety of factors ranging from the inanity of most YouTube videos to the somewhat small number of characters allowed to the obscenely massive number of people from all walks of life that use YouTube. When you have that many people with that many different idea systems all in the same place essentially having a popularity contest for "thumbs up," bad things happen.

 

[piinyouri]

They need to work on their site as a whole first in my opinion.

I've actually started using a sub-par addon called exfm on Winamp to listen to new music since loading videos on youtube has become excruciating exercises in frustration.

This would be a good time for a youtube alternative, a REAL alternative to pop up. They need some damn competition.

 

[ReleGamer]

Nobody likes change...

This will tkae time to get used to, and it seems like so many hoops to jump through.

Isn't having "meaningful" comments at the top result in following comments being pretty meaningless?

where's the sense of involvement if your comments get dumped at the bottom

i don't know, its going to be weird for some time...until we all get used to it...and then they change it again

 

[Strazdas]

So basically they are doing "smarter sorting" means we get sorting by upvotes, nesting - which is a great thing and should be in every comments, and some G+ crap that i wont see since i dont use G+.
overall, this could have been far worse.

Last year Google began asking YouTube users to use their Google+ accounts to log in to YouTube, linking the two accounts together and reducing anonymity.

And they've continued to ask, repeatedly, every couple of days, despite my declining the "offer".

I have accepted they are going to ask every freaking time i open the site. at leas the righto ne is selected by default so i just have to click "ok".

So their official stance is "unintentionally working as intended"?

BUt thats how youtube operated forever now.

 

[NoeL]

I swear, whenever they touch Youtube they only ever manage to make it worse. Since about a week ago I no longer have a button to turn off all annotations. Instead I have to either deal with unwanted shit covering the video, or turn each one off individually if and when they pop up. Why the fuck was this functionality removed?

I also no longer have the option of a "large" player - only default (which is too small) and fullscreen (which hides my taskbar/tabs so I can't see if people are trying to talk to me). Again, why the fuck was this removed?

As for Google+... does anyone else remember when this was the common conception:

Let's all laugh at our ignorance.

 

[Nazulu]

Why can't they make it a FUCKING OPTION?!!! Why?! Not everyone wants the change. Why can't these big corps swallow that pill?

 

[trlkly]

How the fuck is the Google+ thing supposed to help? How many times do you actually view a YouTube page where anyone you know has commented on it? Google+ is LOCAL. YouTube is GLOBAL. They don't intersect at all.

And, yes, I also don't click the button, because they are trying to force me to go on Google+. If it were really an upgrade, they'd do it silently. And they'd get rid of the Google+ branding. The point is, there's some reason they have to ask, and the fact that they repeatedly won't take no for an answer means there's something wrong.

The thing is, I don't want them using my account to pretend like more people use Google+ so that they can make more money on ads. That's the reason behind all this, and it's fucking transparent to anyone with a brain. That's the only reason they could possibly care whether or not I think I'm using Google+--something about the system has to let them.

I don't like mixing social networks with YouTube. Most people don't. It was a bad idea to start with. Kill it, then move on to your consolidation plans. Stop trying to force shit down our throats.

 

[trlkly]

Now, leaving out the Google+ part: what this does is make sure that the trolls have even more power. No troll is stupid enough to use their real name. No troll is going to let their comments be connected to anyone else. All that's going to happen is that the people with unfavorable opinions will now be able to be tracked down in real life. Especially the little kids who haven't been online enough to know about the trolls. That's why any decent person teaches their young kids not to use any identifiable information about themselves online. Too bad Google is doing the opposite.

The only good idea in this is trying to pattern match which posts are welcome and which ones aren't. But how are they going to get the initial data? People constantly vote down comments just because they disagree with them. They'll even say they are spam when they aren't. How is Google going to distinguish between legitimately bad posts?

Even if they do figure that out, this whole thing is marred by them trying to force Google+ when clearly the fact that you have to force it means people have spoken and don't want the extra Google+ features. People don't like having their Google features being localized into a small group of people. They like the global nature of YouTube.

And the whole thing isn't even that hard to fix. Go ahead and consolidate accounts, but don't enable public Google+ profiles. Don't even call the consolidation Google+. Give people the option to turn on Google+ features. And then don't fucking bug them about it again if they decline.

I mean, who do they think they are kidding? Have they not learned anything from the phone number thing? I kept on not giving them one of those, and now they don't ask again. All asking repeatedly does is make you more likely to assume that there's something nefarious going on.

 

[trlkly]

While I would agree with you any day, I cannot when it comes to YouTube. At least not without lying to myself.
I'm all for anonymity on the internet (thanks USA for Prism btw.), but the YouTube comment section is one of the places that actually suffer from it. There's a reason why it has its incredibly bad image and part of it comes from the fact that people can be the biggest assholes towards others without any consequences (in 99% of the cases).

I'd say lack of moderation is a bigger issue than lack of real names.

I don't think it's a bigger problem, but it certainly contributes a lot. Maybe it's even a 50/50 thing. When you look at how people behave on the internet vs IRL, it becomes clear that they abuse the fact that there are no consequences.

Having real names is about prevention, while moderation is about dealing with the alerady existant problem. I think having proper moderation would be the first thing to do though. It hasn't privacy problems attached to it.

Using real names doesn't make people nicer. It give people a way to track down people in real life. Yes, that may scare the few people not smart enough not to use their real names, but it much more greatly affects the people who aren't trying to be trolls and get tracked down by trolls.

Remember Rebecca Black? People flipping called her to wish death threats on her. You can easily be tracked down on a phone. It's not the anonymity that makes people mean. It's the lack of consequences.

And there still will be no consequences, since the system is so easy to exploit. No one who actually wants to troll will use their real name, or will let their account be in any way connected to their real name. Using real names just hurts those who don't know not to use them.

Anonymity is the norm on the Internet for a reason. That's what allows us to be as free as we are. If you want to punish people who abuse the privilege, then punish them. Ban them. Allow them to be automatically blocked and thus ignored. But don't try to somehow outsmart them.

 

[trlkly]

Great. Now I wont see those fucking idiotic spam bots that are like "check out this online game" or telling me how their sister's boyfriend makes 50000000 a fucking month over the internet, fuck those spams.

You mean, the same comments you already don't see because people always mark them as spam?

And, duh, some people are okay with it. That doesn't make it okay to take the choice away from those who aren't. That's the problem. Facebook works because it's a separate part of your life. Google has products that cover pretty much your entire Internet experience.

Some stuff you do online, you just want to do in private, and not share it with the world, even under some other name that only applies to YouTube, and, not, say, your search results.

And what really sucks is that, even if they fix everything, the Google+ brand has been so poisoned by their insistence that I will still say no, just because I don't want to reward them for being jerks about the whole thing.

 

[trlkly]

So if little Timmy wants to rape the CoD-developer's wife over him changing some stats of his fav. weapon, it would help if his daddy finds out and takes away his Xbox for some time.

Parents should already know their little kid's account name. No parent who cares is going to get the kid in trouble just because there's a real name attached. What it might do is alert the kid's friends of his assholishness, but, chances are, the kid already hangs out with other kids who talk and act that way. Plus, again, little Timmy is probably smart enough to just use a fake name--even if it takes getting caught once.

And that's not the worst case scenario. Let's say little Timmy pisses off one of the slightly deranged people online. (Unlike in real life, he can't try to make sure there's no one like that around.) So that person uses Timmy's real name to track him to other websites or even in real life, just to harass him. And what if it turns out little Timmy wasn't even trying to be a jerk, and was just misunderstood? You still okay with that?

And, let's not forget, this is connected with Google+. So little Timmy, not knowing any better, adds a new person who seems cool, who is really just scoping out his profile to track him down. Like all social networking services, Google+ encourages you to put in that information. At least Facebook tries to keep you from adding people you don't know. Google+ is encouraging it, so you'll get to see comments from these people on YouTube.

I worry it's going to take somebody dying for being an asshole online before people realize how dangerous this all is.

 

[webkilla]

As someone who teachers interaction design (no really) - I want to have a stern word or two with whoever it is at google who keeps messing with the youtube UI.

This comment thing? I can see why they're doing it - but I wish they made it optional: Sometimes I do want to see new comments as they come in, as a means to judge if a video is worth watching... I don't necesarily want to see which comment had enough sockpuppet accounts to upvote itself, or who made a funny but completely unrelated joke at the video which everyone upvotes

 

[The_Echo]

Oh, fuck this.

First they remove the "view all comments" button, now they're removing chronological order? It bothers me enough that my Facebook feed defaults to "Top Stories" instead of what's actually happening. Coupling this with Google+ incorporation, I'm kind of starting to hate Google.

Meanwhile, the subscription feed has been broken on and off for years, video playback is all kinds of dumb (seriously, why did they remove pre-buffering?).

I wish the team working YouTube actually understood what their users wanted them to work on.

For all the changes YouTube goes through, some of things just stay broken.

 

[CorvusFerreum]

I'm still annoyed that the Youtube video player was changed and is no longer capable of pre-buffering videos I want to watch, all because of the 144p resolution and the stupid auto-quality-change thing (which frequently switches from the default resolution to 144p or 240p, then back up to the default whenever I start videos, often causing annoying stuttering and pausing roughly twenty-five seconds into anything I'm trying to watch).

Join the Youtube HTML 5 Beta [https://www.youtube.com/html5] and change the video url from "youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO-ID" to "youtube.com/watch_popup?v=VIDEO-ID" (That forces videos that normaly don't run in HTML 5 into HTML 5.). That at least works for me to preload an entire video in every quality. At least for now. Oh: And often the video tries to load new if you go into full screen, overriding the preload. So either test wether it reloads when you go into full screen or just don't go into fullscreen if you are watching a preloaded video. You are mowst welcome. [https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=qd8wn4ybqsE]

OT: That surely will go well, YOutube having such a great reputation in not fucking things up and all.