YouTube Comments Get a Makeover From Google

[Smooth Operator]

We will see how it works, knowing Youtube it probably won't work for another week after changing over and until then they will have 3 new interfaces that work even less.

But anyway there was dire need of change, I would have preffered a simple Ignore feature but this is fine too.

 

[Andrew_C]

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

Considering the "Send feedback" link is how I initiated all this, they're just leading me in circles now.

You are fairly lucky, they deleted the contents of my Youtube account when I told them to shove their google+ where it don't shine. Apparently their systems couldn't cope with the idea of someone with a Youtube account who had disabled google+. After much useless back and forth with google tech support, someone on the Youtube support group on Google Groups suggested trying a rather complex procedure, which eventually worked, but only after trying it in Internet Explorer 10.

Not that there was anything of value that would have been lost if I couldn't restore my Youtube account, it was the principle that mattered.

 

[LegendaryVKickr]

Google seriously, stop. Just stop!! Nobody I know even uses Google+, including one of my cousins, who used to work for your company!! You're not gonna get me to start using it, I don't even like using Facebook anymore, because they kept changing stuff up like this!

Uggh, Google+ is possibly the worst thing that has happened to Youtube. As somebody who has gotten a strike on my account on my account for "harassment" because I disagreed with somebody, I don't have any faith whatsoever in Youtube comments. The fact they're calling it a means of "thoughtful discussion" and "community" honestly made me choke on my lunch just now.

Google, are you seriously this out of touch with reality?

 

[Poetic Nova]

If only htey reverted it back to the layout set in 2010 that would be great.
And instead of fixing numerous errors they give us another pointless update...

 

[Yuuki]

I'm dreading this change - not because I think it's bad, but because 95% of the "changes" that have happened over the last 1-2 years to Youtube have fucking pissed me off and made my experience worse. I'm all for change when change is needed (or improves things), but Youtube has just gone more and more backwards.

Videos take forever to buffer and it instant-seeking is gone thanks to videos no longer buffering into your temp cache files. Now videos have to re-buffer from scratch even if you are seeking to a part WHICH YOU'VE ALREADY SEEN.

The UI has been fucked, it now takes twice the number of clicks to change player-size, change resolution and toggle annotations. I could do all that with single clicks, but no more.

At this rate Google is basically pulling a Facebook - "we provide you a free service, so shut the fuck up and deal with these asinine changes".

I sincerely miss Youtube from 2009-2011.

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

Moderation is left up to the channel/video owner, as it would be nothing short of a colossal waste of resources if Google was to moderate all 87912451 comments posted every minute.

 

[Moth_Monk]

They need to fix the Not Spam button first, ffs.

 

[Charli]

Awww you mean I'll have to TYPE 'noob cock gobble muncher' to get the kind of intellectual discussions that youtube is currently famous for? That's so much work...

They abused the system before, they'll do it again, this is just youtube trying to 'innovate' for the sake of someone keeping their job.

 

[Idlemessiah]

Hmm, it'd be nice if they gave us an option in account settings for turning comments off. My internet is crap and it'll spend ages loading all the comments and avatar pictures when it's supposed to be loading the video.

Also, bring back buffering! Even in 144p my phone line struggles to fit the whole video down in one go resulting in blurry, stuttery, pause ridden shite. I don't mind going and making a coffee while the video buffers. It's what I do here on the Escapist and that all works fine with me.

Here you go;
http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

This should help with the unnecessary loading of data.

Well it isn't perfect but it's a ton better than what I'm used to and I now have no choice but to ignore the lowest pit of human discourse that is the youtube comments section, not that I'm complaining about that! Thank you very much you internet samaritan

 

[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.