YouTube Kill Its Comments or Save Them?

You Tube Comments

Comments on YouTube, stuffed as they were with over their justifiable share of offense and senselessness, were hardly the foremost beloved a part of the web. therefore we have a tendency to cheered a couple of weeks back once the Google-owned video web site proclaimed a serious modification to its comments system. The aim was to bring a lot of common and fascinating comments to the highest, aboard comments from individuals you really understand.


But because the new system extended for many users on, it became clear that there have been variety of trade-offs. you cannot reply to previous comments, even ones created simply hours before the new system kicked in. you furthermore may need to check in for a Google+ account (just as you are doing for Gmail).


That maddened lots of individuals. Some 54,000 users and reckoning have signed a modification.org petition asking the corporate to travel back to its previous comments system. A NSFW song from associate angry user with the catchy chorus "F*ck You Google+" has been doing the rounds. YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim had solely denote one issue on the positioning — the terribly 1st YouTube video, concerning his trip to the menagerie — till Fri, once he additional this comment: "why the f*ck do i would like a google+ account to touch upon a video?"

YouTube, and company parent Google, merit lots of this vitriol. The video service ought to have identified beforehand that new and previous comments weren't practical. A YouTube representative told Pine Tree State that the corporate was acting on creating the 2 commenting systems see one another. however you have got to wonder: Was this a deliberate plan to draw a line underneath each previous conversation? is that this YouTube's Year Zero?

Google is doing itself no favors with its constant pushing of Google+. Internally, there looks to be some variety of evolution in however Google+ is viewed: it's a lot of your one overarching Google account to rule all than it's a social network. however that hasn't stopped the corporate from asserting Google+ user numbers quarterly as if it were a real Facebook rival.

Sorry, Google, you cannot have it each ways that. A social network you're forced to check in for isn't any social network the least bit, associated it makes the corporate seem like an rabid, to a fault desperate cruise director.


That said, I still applaud what YouTube is attempting to try to to here. YouTube comments were crammed with over their share of dogmatism, bullying, spam, shaming and troll, to call simply a couple of types of mindless discourse. It wasn't one thing that might be resolved with a couple of tweaks here or there. the complete culture of anonymous commenting on videos required to travel.

You don't really want to travel to Google+ to search out out once somebody commented on your video. It ought to pop underneath the notifications at the highest of each Google page (the bit that appears sort of a bell). the matter is that the perception: If enough YouTube commenters suppose that Google is attempting to push them toward exploitation its work, they'll simply like to not comment the least bit.

And that, continual on a good scale, could also be a worse outcome than we have a tendency to had before. For all their odiousness, YouTube comments were associate exercise in free speech. A layer of civility is fascinating in any discourse, however untied free speech is usually higher than silence