
Vi Hart: cramming G+ into YouTube has made comments even worse, I'm leaving - wyclif
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/13/vi-hart-cramming-g-into-yout.html
======
Shish2k
"The promise [...] was that making people use their real names would
incentivize them to behave themselves. It's abundantly clear now that there
are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real
names. In the meantime, people who have good reason not to post under their
own names -- vulnerable people, whistleblowers, others -- are now fully on
display to those sociopaths who are only too happy to press the attack with or
without anonymity."

Told you so :(

Though I'm personally in a slightly different position, where my online handle
is my public face that my hard earned reputation is linked to, but google
wants me to use the birth-certificate name that nobody has heard of >:( (And
it's not easy to just lie about my real name since I once bought something
with google wallet, so they've seen my credit card and they want my profile
name to be in sync with that...)

~~~
Sharlin
"It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are
willing to be jerks under their real names."

The frightening thing is that most of these people probably are not
consciously trying to be jerks -- they simply do not realize that their
behavior counts as "being a jerk". Thus, it's trivial to see why having to use
their real name does not matter much if at all.

~~~
ChuckMcM
No, the frightening thing is the people who are jerks, know it, and don't
care. The Jerry Springerization [1] of the audience. Further there is a bit of
nerd backlash in the heartland going on. While the readers here might aspire
to being the next Zuckerberg, in central part of the US there is a
statistically significant part of the population which has this 'over rich,
under religious, morally suspect' view of "successful" people in tech.

[1] Jerry Springer, host of a TV show with people acting badly on it and
essentially becoming 'famous' has made acting badly more acceptable to way too
many people.

~~~
Loughla
"While the readers here might aspire to being the next Zuckerberg, in central
part of the US there is a statistically significant part of the population
which has this 'over rich, under religious, morally suspect' view of
"successful" people in tech."

Working in the fly-over (and quite cold this time of year) part of the states
in a position that puts me in contact with quite literally thousands of them
every quarter, I call BS on this one. I wouldn't say that most people see tech
folks as that. I would say that most people in the farmy part of the country
don't really have an opinion about the tech industry, and those that do see
tech people as generally useless, or just disconnected from the lives of the
rest of us.

They believe that there is a lot of money being thrown around, and that some
of the technology coming from the coasts will be useful in their lives, or
will be convenient for talking to people, but for the most part they're
indifferent.

It has very little to do with religion or wealth, and more to do with
lifestyle (city v country) and focus (work v family).

~~~
jff
Seems like coastal tech types are more judgmental than these people living in
the sneered-at "flyover states". The amount of contempt you see out here in
the bay area is just staggering.

------
joemaller1
Why link BoingBoing and not directly to her actual blog post?

[http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-
tw...](http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-twilight-
except-in-this-version-when-cullen-drinks-bellatubes-blood-they-both-become-
mortal-but-cullen-is-still-an-abusive-creep-also-it-is-still-bad/)

~~~
sampo
Her actual blog post has been submitted [1], too, but it has a very
nondescriptive title "Google+ YouTube Integration" so it had no chance of
getting upvoted to HN frontpage.

I mean, the title is a good title for her blog, but as it does not mention Vi
Hart (and why would it, it's her blog), it makes a very nondescriptive title
for a HN submission.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069)

~~~
sampo
As HN policy is to keep the original titles of the submitted links, this
probably has the consequence that only original content that has an "upvote-
able" title, can reach HN frontpage.

If the original content is good, but has a "non-upvote-able" title, then the
only way for that kind of news to reach HN frontpage is if a third party re-
blogs about them with a better title.

As happened in this case.

~~~
possibilistic
That's kind of a terrible side effect, isn't it?

I understand the existing policy as it is used to prevent editorializing, but
it's unfortunate that this burying of interesting/original content can also
result.

~~~
sp332
PG posted about it recently.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466)
He basically said it's an acceptable loss compared to policing linkbait.

~~~
barrkel
I suspect it has the opposite effect; rather, it promotes spammy linkbait
reblog content on HN.

~~~
mhb
Coming soon: An automated article wrapper whose sole purpose is to re-title
otherwise interesting articles?

~~~
smacktoward
You pretty much just described the entire business model of Gawker, Business
Insider, and the Huffington Post.

------
simias
I guess Google couldn't resist tapping into one of their only successful
social media (Youtube) to promote G+. Of course Youtube being right below
4chan's /b/ in terms of online discussion it was a very risky decision.

Google is very good at sorting the web and finding the interesting content. I
think in the long run they might be able to do the same thing with comments
and be able to extract the insightful content and weed out all the noise. If
they manage to do that it could be a revolution: imagine a website like reddit
where you could automatically hide all low-content submissions and comments
based on your preferences.

They're definitely not there though, so far this G+/Youtube integration is an
unmitigated disaster. It even broke my Chrome plugin that removed all comments
from Youtube videos. Life is suffering.

~~~
corresation
_I guess Google couldn 't resist tapping into one of their only successful
social media (Youtube) to promote G+._

This is a common sentiment, but doesn't simple platform pragmatism make it
obvious why they want to merge disparate identities and systems? Why _should_
YouTube have an island comment system given that it's a Google property? Of
course the replacement should be ready for prime time (it sounds like some
basic features are missing right now, such as channel owner moderation), but
the eventual move to that is something that under virtually any situation
anyone would recommend.

My Flickr account got turned into a Yahoo account. My Skype account is now a
Live account or whatever. Of course these things come together, and I'm not
quite sure why every narrative about things like this (not necessary your
post) has to be "G+ needs to take on Facebook so this is how it's doing it",
when the more obvious explanation of "Company homogenizes systems" fits so
well.

Further one annoying aspect of this whole drama is that to demonstrate that
there is a problem, people _become_ the problem. It seems like the vast
majority of abuse in YouTube land right now are people desperately trying to
demonstrate that the Google+ migration was a mistake (e.g. copy pasting tanks
an other inanities). This demonstrates that people resist change more than any
fault in the new platform.

~~~
gdulli
"Why _should_ YouTube have an island comment system given that it's a Google
property?"

That's a very Google-centric way of looking at it. From their point of view,
merging everything may be a big convenience and make them more money through
more detailed profiling of users.

But my end user point of view is the opposite. The fact that one company with
a product I use bought another company with an unrelated product I use,
because it happens to create efficiencies on a balance sheet, doesn't
magically create a desire within me to use those products together.

I don't need some stupid cat video I clicked on and watched for 10 seconds
affecting my searches and ads I see. My choice of what videos to watch is by
default disjoint from my other online activities. If I want to share a video,
I'll do it explicitly and don't need any integration to make that happen.
Having my actions tracked across unrelated sites and reported to everyone I
know, and a labyrinthine scheme of privacy settings I would need to constantly
monitor to stay configured the way I want, just keeps me off social networks
altogether and using adblock/ghostery everywhere.

~~~
corresation
_That 's a very Google-centric way of looking at it. From their point of view,
merging everything may be a big convenience and make them more money through
more detailed profiling of users._

It's a very every company ever way of looking at it -- if you have multiple
systems that do largely the same thing, you take the better or more
encompassing of the two (or three, etc) and let it win. This is 90% of the
purpose of companies acquiring systems and companies.

As to tracking, do you think Google didn't already track you with complete
accuracy and knowledge? I don't think this does anything at all to improve
their profiling of you. Literally nothing. They probably have some hopes about
engagement, but I would wager the primary motivation is simply rationalizing
systems.

And let's be clear -- YouTube's comments _before_ this debacle were a garbage
dump of noise. They represented the most notorious, least signal manifestation
of comments on the tubes. Now, apparently, distaste for Google+ is enough for
people to black that out of their memory?

------
skore
I mostly use YouTube to watch channels that I subscribe to. I already disliked
when they switched to their new "feeds" view that makes following channels
very tough (sometimes videos are missing, the list only goes so long, but I
want to watch something far later, also no real control over what goes into
your list in the first place etc.). That made me write my own feed view[0].

Vi mentioning torrents made me wonder: would combining torrents with something
like flattr and a reasonably good ui plus maybe a choice of where to host
comments (reddit etc.) be something that I should be working on?

Since torrents eliminate the hosting overhead, there is no real extra cost
that content providers would have to pay here. Probably the only question is
whether people would support something like that through flattr, but it seems
to me like patreon[1] is doing pretty well already. And the model to keep
content at a "release early to paying members, then to the public" makes a lot
of sense in general. The only real problem I can see is that YouTube does have
the benefit of being very accessible - automatically converting videos for
mobile devices etc..

[0] [https://github.com/daviddeutsch/yt-
sanegrid/](https://github.com/daviddeutsch/yt-sanegrid/) [1]
[http://www.patreon.com/](http://www.patreon.com/)

~~~
MetaCosm
Accessibility and streaming. I don't always want to download an entire video,
sometimes I just want to dip into it and see if I am interested. There are
streaming modes for torrents available in some clients that try to prioritize
what you need to stream, but they never have worked very well in my
experience.

Giving up accessibility and mobile seems like the touch of death.

~~~
this_user
Not having to download a video/piece of music is exactly the problem that
YouTube solved. Going back to this doesn't seem like the right answer to me
and will likely cost you most of your audience. Furthermore, moving to
torrents is hardly a solution for YouTubers who actually monetise their videos
through the site.

The better solution, if you don't agree with their new comment policy, would
be to migrate to another video site like Vimeo.

~~~
skore
> Furthermore, moving to torrents is hardly a solution for YouTubers who
> actually monetise their videos through the site.

That's why I mentioned flattr and patreon.

------
YTerThrowaway
Before this becomes another Google bashing session, I'd like to point out that
this is one person's opinion, a respectable opinion from an intelligent person
but still it's very subjective and a mainly a reactive judgment (see the
post's date).

I am subscribed to a number of channels, mainly edu/pop science stuff. I took
note to scroll through the comment sections during the change and from what I
saw the quality generally improved. I was also pleasantly surprised to see
better discourse under some of the more popular entertainment videos although
in the first couple of days there was the occasional protest comment. It’s the
gaming videos that attract the largest amount of trolling and ASCII art
comments.

Ironically those protesting the comments are the ones producing the spam,
seemingly just to prove a point. The main complaints: lack of character limit,
users can reply to their own comments, and the order of the comments. This
isn't unfixable, they'll have to study the new comment corpus and tweak
accordingly, there is no one size solution to trolls/spam, just data. And I
hope Vi takes that into consideration. The new comment system might need a
short while to mature, the fact that it wasn't perfect out of the gate doesn't
mean it's a bad concept.

I remember similar amount of displeasure on display when YouTube changed the
rating system from 5 stars to thumbs up/down, and there was always the smaller
retaliations following each redesign (youtubers hated the new unified channel
design at first and produced the mandatory protest videos) there is also
residual anger because YouTube nixed video responses late last month due to
low usage.

It’s mainly aversion to change, this time the change is bigger and is
noticeable not just to those that make the videos.

~~~
hysan
Even if the YouTube comments will be of higher quality in the long run, there
is one functionality problem that I am wondering how Google will resolve. That
is, enabling Safe Search on your Google Account will turn on Safety Mode by
default in YouTube [1]. This in turn will auto-hide comments. This makes for a
very poor user experience for those who wish to see comments by default but
also keep their Safe Search on - something that was possible prior to the
merge.

[1]
[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/174084?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/174084?hl=en)

~~~
cbhl
I'm curious about your use case. Why would you be okay with YouTube comments
(which could be full of profanity and/or the names of reproductive organs) but
still want Safe Search enabled?

~~~
fluidcruft
Isn't that a pretty broad brush you're using there? Not all comments are full
of profanity and/or the names of reproductive organs. Wouldn't your approach
to Safe Search be to not return any links (which could be full of profanity
and/or the names of reproductive organs)?

~~~
cbhl
Then wouldn't it make more sense to complain that Safety Mode should filter
"bad" comments rather than all comments entirely than to complain that you
want Safety Mode and Safe Search to be in different states?

I thought the point of these features was "think of the children" (and letting
kids access comments that aren't moderated is a big no-no in online safety),
but clearly there are use cases that aren't being captured here.

~~~
hysan
fluidcruft was right on the money. You're painting quite a broad stroke on the
comments there. To elaborate, my use case is this:

On YouTube, the only channels I read comments on are the educational ones
(Crash Course, Grey Explains, SciShow, etc.). For everything else, I don't
care much for hearing what other people think. So in my use case, I honestly
haven't seen much profanity or bad comments in my entire time using YouTube.

For Google, I use strict Safe Search because I don't care for NSFW content. I
also work at a school and when I need to search for images to use on handouts,
I don't want any NSFW content to appear.

> Then wouldn't it make more sense to complain that Safety Mode should filter
> "bad" comments rather than all comments entirely than to complain that you
> want Safety Mode and Safe Search to be in different states?

No, because prior to Google forcing my G+ account to merge with my legacy
YouTube account, I was able to have these in different states. YouTube had
Safety Mode off and Google had Safe Search on. If Google is going to force
people to merge accounts, then they should not be removing functionality that
existed when the accounts were separate. Complaining for a feature to change,
when it was working perfectly fine on its own before, is far less productive
than pointing out how two features worked separately before they were merged
together. This also ties in with what theOnliest says below. There is a very
distinct different between the two use cases (reading YouTube comments and
using Google Search). It does not make sense to merge the two features;
especially if you aren't going to rename then into a single feature (there is
no indication on YouTube and Google Preferences that changing one will affect
the other).

~~~
cbhl
Hmm, I see. Thanks!

------
zedpm
Check out the beta for "lightweight" Youtube, dubbed Feather[1]. It's a
streamlined layout without comments or other junk. I've found that the user
experience with Youtube has been steadily declining for several years; this
seems to mitigate many of the issues I've had.

[1][http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta](http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta)

~~~
josteink
So the fix for youtube breaking perfectly fine comments in a move to push G+
on the unwanting, is to remove comments all together?

Seriously?

~~~
TheCraiggers
Perfectly fine? Maybe you only watch videos in an extremely narrow group,
which typically have only the most eloquent and empathetic commenters, but I
think most people would argue that comments have been the worse part of
Youtube since their inception.

Spam, trolls, racists, and flamers were routinely "thumbed up" in comments.
And then we have the comments consisting entirely of "exact quote from the
video you just watched" which typically have hundreds of thumbs up as well,
and add absolutely nothing to any discussion on the video itself. I don't
think I'm alone in saying the SNR of Youtube comments was low to the point
that I never sought out to read them any more. And when I did, it was more of
a "lets see how bad the train-wreck is" mentality.

~~~
conradfr
Stupid comments never bothered me, sometimes they are even funny, that's the
beauty of it.

Moreover, did Google/Youtube said they pushed the change due to quality of
comments ?

~~~
oblio
They're funny until you see a gazillion pages of them.

~~~
fluidcruft
You don't have to see a gazillion of them if the good stuff is on the first
page.

~~~
oblio
Quote from parent: "Stupid comments"

Stupid comments = good stuff? :)

------
PilateDeGuerre
This is blogspam.

Original content: [http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-
tw...](http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-twilight-
except-in-this-version-when-cullen-drinks-bellatubes-blood-they-both-become-
mortal-but-cullen-is-still-an-abusive-creep-also-it-is-still-bad/)

~~~
wyclif
Actually, the original post _was_ submitted. As was pointed out above, this is
not blogspam. It's a result of HN's policy that only original titles can be
used. The original blog post has a title that isn't nearly as friendly to
upvoting. It's a system that has its pros and cons, but it's what HN has
decided to do.

~~~
jamesbritt
_As was pointed out above, this is not blogspam._

Well, boingboing _is_ festooned with ads and affiliate links. It's a business,
after all.

The problem is not so much whether BB is blogspam[0] but that blogspam often
has a better chance of getting up-voted on HN.

[0]: My view: There are many ads, but half the time there's some sensible
additional commentary for the target post, so there's plausible value in
exchange for the ads.

~~~
leephillips
Boingboing is a good place to find interesting things, but they value traffic
more than correctness : [http://lee-phillips.org/notmiles/](http://lee-
phillips.org/notmiles/)

~~~
jamesbritt
True. I've found many good and useful things there, but every so often they
post something that is clearly dubious or a hoax. That's fine as things go;
people make mistakes.

But when caught out they tend (to the extent I've seen) to either say nothing
or to just delete the post, rather than make an effort to correct mistakes.

(On a related note, I'm amazed at the level of snark and bile in the some of
the comments on Boing-boing; the nasty ones rival or out-do the worst of
Youtube.)

------
jamesbritt
Interesting tweet from Vi Hart:

 _I repeat, I have no plans to stop uploading to YouTube. I like @doctorow but
that article 's title was sensationalist and quite incorrect._

[https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576](https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576)

------
InclinedPlane
Google's revenue is structured like this: search, peering agreements and
whatnot, and way, way down the ledger: "other". Most of the products that
google makes are just toys. The pressure is off because nobody at google
expects anything in the "other" category to earn company-affecting levels of
revenue. As a consequence google has spent years and years being in huge
businesses that it barely understands and barely cares about. Youtube being a
prime example of that.

Youtube has lots of problems, but it has lots of amazingly wonderful aspects
as well. It is rapidly becoming a very important part of the way people
communicate in the 21st century. Yet google is so ham fisted in their handling
of youtube they have no idea what to do with it other than use it as a lever
to compete against facebook. Google should be coddling the creators on
youtube, these are people who have acquired very enthusiastic and very large
fanbases through the medium of youtube. Some folks make their living entirely
off of youtube. Others use youtube as a critical part of their brand and their
business. Many musicians have kickstarted their careers through youtube, for
example.

Google should be understanding the way these people use youtube, and improving
the tools they have available to make their lives easier. To help them connect
even better with their audiences and fan bases. Instead google treats content
creators little better than any other average user of youtube.

Google didn't switch the youtube comment system to g+ for any benevolent
reasons, those were just excuses and justifications for them to try to roll
out the g+ empire far enough for it to actually get traction.

Meanwhile they are pissing off the people who add the greatest value to
youtube. The trolls and spammers don't give a shit. Even in the worst case
scenario for them where they are completely and utterly silenced it's not a
big deal, they'll just find some other outlet. Meanwhile everyone else pays
the price.

The saddest part is that google doesn't even realize the value of what they
have, and because they are so inept at monetizing anything other than slapping
ads on it they may never realize until they've destroyed it or driven everyone
elsewhere.

------
vog
Original article: [http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-
tw...](http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-twilight-
except-in-this-version-when-cullen-drinks-bellatubes-blood-they-both-become-
mortal-but-cullen-is-still-an-abusive-creep-also-it-is-still-bad/)

HN Discussion to the original article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069)

------
r0h1n
On Twitter, Vi Hart denies this:
[https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576](https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576)

"I repeat, I have no plans to stop uploading to YouTube. I like @doctorow but
that article's title was sensationalist and quite incorrect."

------
joelrunyon
What are the top main 3 competitors to youtube (besides vimeo).

Shouldn't someone be able to come up with a half decent competitor at this
point in the game? Seems like Google is trying really hard to kill the best
media property they've got.

~~~
a3n
I think the ultimate competitor for these kinds of things will be no
competitor, when people can just post things "up there" that don't appear to
be tied to any obviously identifiable gatekeeper.

~~~
drcube
They already have that. You might have heard of it, it's called "the web". :)

But seriously, the FSF or somebody needs to work on the problems Youtube and
Facebook solve, but urgently. When posting things on your own website and
sharing it with your friends becomes as easy as updating your facebook status,
much disruption will ensue.

It just doesn't seem like it should be that hard. A fancy UI on top of email
and an easy homepage creator is all it would take, right? Opt-in advertising
could give people a choice whether to display ads or pay for hosting.

Couldn't web hosting companies make a lot of money and compete with Facebook
and Google if they innovated this way? Because, basically, that's what
Facebook is selling. Hosting+fancy UI. I must be missing something because
nobody seems to be doing this.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
We need IPv6 first I feel; then we need the idea of a personal IP address that
can act as a personal gateway to your computer. Then there needs to be a
social platform which merely acts as a caching proxy for connection to you.

At that point we can do FB but have it decentralised, you won't need a sharing
service you'll just need to give people your IP - this I felt was the idea
behind Opera's Unite "server in a browser".

~~~
jff
"Boy I'd sure love to see the pictures from Dan's wedding, but his desktop got
a virus so he's offline."

You could use a little Pogoplug-style appliance, but you're still placing
usability at the mercy of Comcast, clueless users, and curious cable-pulling
children.

------
j2kun
The people at Google need to open source the comment data if they can't figure
it out themselves. I could take a crack at it and at least I'd get rid of the
comments that spout "nigger" a hundred times.

~~~
ithkuil
Your HN post has been quarantined because you used a forbidden word. We are
sorry if you were legitimately using it to spawn a meta-discussion about
sensitive topics, we are very sensitive about internet censorship issues, but
please understand that our natural language parser is optimized for the most
common content, and that doesn't include (hopefully) insightful comments like
yours.

~~~
sillysaurus2
That's silly and untrue.

EDIT: Mmh. Humor on the internet?!

~~~
dan00
It might be a satire on filtering comments by "certain" words.

~~~
wikwocket
Yeah, that's a clbuttic mistake.

------
talkingstove
Title is just incorrect: She isn't leaving. She is only "maybe" turning off
comments and moving discussion to Reddit.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Reddit? No hateful comments there then ...

Guess at least you can have moderators.

Sounds like Reddit need to add a video distribution system, it would be quite
a thing to pick top vloggers and add them in to the current mix.

I wonder where Vi Hart stands WRT her content. Can she remove it from YouTube.
Could she remove it via a copyright infringement claim?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Sub-reddits are like irc channels or usenet newsgroups, they can have owners
and be moderated to whatever degree those owners desire. Some sub-reddits are
very tightly moderated.

------
theklub
Who actually reads youtube comments? Anyone here? They should just remove
comments all together or allow only the video poster to create and approve
comments.

~~~
slig
+1. I don't see why there's so much whining. The YT comments are shit, and
you'll be doing yourself a favor installing by a extension like this [1]
(which, unfortunately, doesn't work with the new system yet)

Doesn't want to comment under your real name for whatever reason (trolling,
personal info, fear of being stalked, etc)? Don't comment. Everyone will be
better off.

[1] [http://www.tannr.com/herp-derp-youtube-
comments/](http://www.tannr.com/herp-derp-youtube-comments/)

------
mcphilip
From the perspective of a content consumer without a youtube account, the
quality of the service continues to decrease. The most basic use case of
uploading and linking to or embedding content remains invaluable, but
functionality facilitating content exploration has noticeably diminished over
time. This can clearly be seen in the list of suggested videos presented to
the user for each video being watched.

Google, understandably, wants to increase metrics related to time spent on
site since it facilitates selling ads. This has led from suggestions having
less emphasis on presenting related videos. Instead, priority is given to
videos algorithmically determined to most likely be clicked on by the viewer.
This has resulted in the suggestion list becoming increasingly obnoxious even
for viewers without youtube accounts.

For instance, if I pull up the Dead Skeletons - Dead Mantra music video [1] --
my new favorite psychedelic rock song -- the first four video suggestions are:

I. Weird trick for baldness (ad)

II. Dead Skeletons Mix (playlist of 49 videos)

III. Magical Healing Aura - Om Mani Padme Hum (featured video) [new age esque
instrumental with 8 million views]

IV. MOST SHOCKING DEATHS ON CAMERA!!!!!!!!!!!!.flv [presumably a Faces of
Death style video for those that enjoy watching people die; absolutely not
something I want to expose myself to]

The deaths on camera video only recently infected the suggestion list for this
video. Apparently it's the highest ranking result of some algorithm predicting
what I'll most likely click on independent of the video I landed on. My only
guess at explaining this suggestion is I recently followed some youtube and
wikipedia links on reddit about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Edgar
Allen Poe's death.

This obnoxious suggestion that I can't opt out of has made me pay more
attention to the top suggestions on the videos I watch. Ultimately I'm served
up with suggestions that increasingly remind me how Google is tracking my past
behavior even though I don't currently use a youtube or gmail account. This
has left me longing for the good old days of youtube where I would often
follow related video links and discover great new content.

The result of these changes in video recommendation strategy is gradually
conditioning me to expect personalized linkbait instead of related content,
leading to less time spent on site.

It's a damn shame that Google is so focused on maximizing ad sales at the
expense of content exploration functionality. The immediate value and
historical importance of the content hosted on YouTube needs a better steward
than Google. Thank god Wikipedia hasn't fallen into the hands of a for-profit
entity. I can imagine Google getting their hands on the current Wikipedia
functionality and gradually jailing users in a Panopticon of filter bubbles
optimized for ad targeting -- Orwell spinning in his grave.

Hopefully I'll be able to look back on the previous paragraph in the future
and see it proved to be FUD...

[1][http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsyrOGRxF0E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsyrOGRxF0E)

Edit: I may be wrong about the MOST SHOCKING DEATHS ON VIDEO!!!!!!!!!.flv
suggestion being targeted specifically at me. However, "The Stupidest Bid on
The Price is Right" further down the suggestion list almost certainly is.

~~~
nawitus
>Google, understandably, wants to increase metrics related to time spent on
site since it facilitates selling ads.

The funny thing is that Google's original success was based on creating a
search engine which didn't try to "trap" users to the site, instead giving
what they wanted quickly.

~~~
argonaut
The problem is that search engine != video sharing site.

The sign of a good search engine is one where the user leaves quickly because
the user finds the content they want quickly.

The sign of a good video sharing site is one where the user stays because the
user keeps finding videos they want to watch.

So, in fact, I would find it perfectly acceptable if Google does measure
YouTube's performance (and product quality) by a metric related to time spent
on site.

------
ceautery
I like the idea of turning off comments, and then linking to a Reddit post in
the video description. An alternative to that, should you not be balking at
required G+ integration, is visiting the comment management[1] page. It should
be possible to build a vetted user base with the tools there.

You'd have to do some heavy upfront work approving comments and adding
approved users, but I believe it would ultimately pay off more than
piggybacking on another free service to de-spam comments. Instead, it would be
sort of a throwback to the old BBS days when sysops of some boards would call
you to verify your account before adding you as a user.

And clearly Google is going to address the nonsense comments somehow, since so
many high-profile users are complaining now and threatening to leave. I'm
genuinely curious how this will all play out; it may be a good test as to
whether management and devs at Google still have "chops".

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/comment_management](https://www.youtube.com/comment_management)

------
rtpg
>It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are
willing to be jerks under their real names.

I hate this argument, because the argument has never been that no person would
be rude under their name, it's that there would be _less_ rudeness:

I think axiomatically we can assume that real-name policies won't make people
more rude (except maybe on the topic of real-name policies). Here by rude I
mean the stupidity of the sort you basically only find in online comments.

So we can then say that there just as many (or less) people being rude on the
same site with real-name policies as a site without. I feel less incentive to
be rude when my name is next to the comment. I use YouTube. Therefore there is
less rudeness thanks to this policy.

For every website I use that has a real-name policy, it has been effective in
reducing the amount of rudeness by 1 person's worth.

I would really hope for some scientific studies on how much awfulness we could
avoid by people owning up to what they say.

~~~
cbhl
> I hate this argument, because the argument has never been that no person
> would be rude under their name, it's that there would be less rudeness:

The counter-argument to this is that real names policies oppress the very
people that were enabled by pseudonyms on the internet: women (especially in
tech), minorities, and whistleblowers, because they're at risk of being
ostracized in real life based on their online comments if their real names are
associated with said comments.

That said, I think the Real Names argument here is a red herring -- hundreds
of employees at Facebook and Google have rehashed this argument over and over
again to death. The real uproar here is the change in the "social contract"
between users and YouTube; similar to people being upset about ads being added
to Twitter or about developer APIs being shut down or when a free service goes
to a paid model.

------
adamb_
In the entirety of my YouTube use (circa 2006!) I think I've left ~3 comments.
I've never seen comments as a core feature of why I use YouTube so this won't
change my perceived usefulness of it.

This reminds me of Facebook's changes in ~2010: They changed the entire layout
of the site twice in the same year and there was noticeable backlash, but
everyone quickly got over it and (more importantly) usage kept going up. At
this point YouTube accounts for 18% of US traffic[1]... I don't think there's
a substitute premium video service that has the infrastructure to support that
level of usage.

[1] [http://allthingsd.com/20131111/netflix-youtube-half-your-
bro...](http://allthingsd.com/20131111/netflix-youtube-half-your-broadband-
diet/)

------
just2n
Is there any development into an open and free video sharing site similar to
what YT used to be? Something where the users of the site are actually the
customers and are treated as such?

There is plenty of content I'd subscribe to see on YouTube.

If there is, it's something we should promote. If there isn't, we should build
it.

A note to Google: when users are looking to get away from your otherwise
incredibly successful services, it might indicate there's a very serious
problem that should be corrected immediately. People want alternatives to
Search, Mail, and now YouTube based on your policies and how you mistreat and
ignore users. Perhaps something needs to change before this evil spreads to
everything Google owns.

~~~
jff
> open and free video sharing site

> the users of the site are actually the customers

Well which is it? Do you want it to be free, or do you want to be treated like
a customer? Because you don't store and serve millions of videos on sunshine,
it takes data centers and lots of bandwidth.

~~~
just2n
Both. They aren't mutually exclusive. I don't believe ads are a valid source
of monetization. Once you start showing ads, you invariably become evil.

Free to use, free content by default, with premiums and ratings/comments to
help people decide what's worth paying for.

There are a number of shows I watch on YT that I find very entertaining. If
the latest 3-5 episodes, posted daily are available to a channel subscriber
for something like $2.99 a month, and episodes older than that are free, you
can either watch things for free or get access to them as they're made and be
more involved with the author via comments, etc. There are more options than
"free" or "paid" or "advertisement supported." Unfortunately we're still stuck
in a world that's riding the coattails of the cable industry, which is now
dying, so perhaps that's a bad model to emulate.

------
j2kun
FWIW I don't think that G+ is a bad system, or even beyond succeeding. I just
think the majority of content posted is mindless.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's a given. As I've been railing for years on G+, at Web scale, Sturgeon's
Law is six sigma compliant: 99.99966% of everything is crap.

G+ has a filter problem. Robert Scoble's been on them about this from the
start. Clay Shirkey has also observed (in the general case) that it's not a
data overload, but filter underload. Human information handling capacity is
limited and we can only process so much.

My preferred mode of using G+ is through Notifications and Search. Both need
much love, but they're vastly better than Streams and Communities.

All of which I've written on at length on G+.

------
peterwwillis
Why do we even need comments on YouTube?

~~~
bane
It's kind of like reddit. On some very niche channels, there's actually "ok"
discussions. Usually requests for more information that wasn't in the
video...that sort of thing. It's not _great_ discourse, but I've found it
useful from time to time.

------
csmuk
Oddly, I tend to use Bing video search to browse youtube and watch videos now.
The experience is better.

------
migrantgeek
I wasn't aware so many people cared about YouTube comments.

I'd actually forgot they existed after installing a plugin to have them
removed a couple of years back. When I did notice comments, I can't remember
an instance where a comment added value to the video.

They always just seemed to oscillate between the "yeah, awesome!" variety or
quickly devolving to name calling and borderline hate speech.

I think I'll leave the plugin enabled and not bother with it at all.

------
joshdance
I think it would be interesting to have a tagging system on comments. For
example you could tag comments as "abusive" "trollish" "insightful" "funny"
etc. If enough people tagged a comment as abusive or trollish it would be
hidden. Of course there are still huge problems with this, but it would be an
interesting experiment.

------
anonymous
As the old adage goes: NEVER EVER build your business as completely dependent
atop a Microsoft product. Or if you must, expect to go out of business at some
point. In the 21st century, you can replace Microsoft with Google or Facebook
or whatever else pops up that gets to their level. I'm willing to bet people
will next be burned by relying too much on AWS.

------
jamesbritt
_... now her regular, good commenters comments hover at the bottom of the
pile, while hateful trolls whose messages generate a lot of replies are judged
"good" by G+ and promoted to the top._

Can someone link to an instance of this? I checked out three or four of her
videos and the top comments all seem non-hateful, non-trollish.

------
lifeisstillgood
oh thank god someone said it - YouTube is effectively unusable, it stinks.
It's like visiting the X factor shopping mall, with bikinis. (Possibly I have
a YouTube bubble I should not admit to but I am assuming that's the default)

I just cannot imagine staying on the front page for any more than 3 seconds.

------
anigbrowl
So your videos are going to be available as torrents from your own site? Good
luck growing your audience.

EDIT: turns out that she was considering hosting _commentary_ on her own site,
but has no plans to take her videos off YouTube, and criticized BB for a
misleading headline:
[https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576](https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576)

I don't care for the integration of G+ in YouTube either, but a) there was no
shortage of hateful BS in YouTube comments prior to this (as well as some
outstanding humor) and b) you can disable comments and even ratings for any
video that you upload and/or make them private (eg for fans or even paying
subscribers).

------
tantalor
_promoting hateful inflammatory comments because they provoke responses_

Please don't feed the trolls.

------
sixQuarks
I can't believe no one has said anything about this yet, but the big problem
with youtube comments is the way they're ranked. By replies, not by upvotes.
Whoever decided on that needs to be fired.

------
merlish
I hope Google manage to sort this out some time soon. In the short term, just
undoing everything and going back to the old comment system might actually be
a good idea.

------
dinkumthinkum
I mean this I. All seriousness, I prefer YouTube comments the way they were.
These comments provided a great data point for determing how large oercebtages
of humans really are. Forcing these G+ real name stuff is just like sticking
your head in the sand and pretending that much of the world online, not just
on places like Stormfront, is a cesspool of racism, ignorance, and hate.
Myself, I prefer to see things as they are.

------
tn13
I have resisted the Google+ Tyranny for long. I have refused to vote my fav.
apps on Android, I refuse to comment on youtube videos and so on.

------
myronbolitar
Not that they wouldn't have ruined it, but Google must be kicking themselves
for not trying more aggressively to buy Twitter years ago.

------
herge
Has anyone used any YouTube competitors? Ms. Hart wants to stream her videos
through bittorent, but how much trouble is using vimeo instead?

~~~
lambda
I'm not sure Vimeo is really the right platform. Vimeo seems a lot more
targeted towards the art of videography itself, so comments about technique
and editing and so on are a lot more common, rather than the actual content of
the video.

~~~
wrongc0ntinent
This probably happened because vimeo offered better quality encoding early on.

~~~
sesqu
It also has a lot to do with their terms. All content must be 100% original.

------
perlpimp
[http://youtu.be/jQjocZXHOg4](http://youtu.be/jQjocZXHOg4)

to the point video from discussion on the site about the article.

2c.

------
kunai
Why not post her original comments? [http://vihart.com/](http://vihart.com/)

------
baldfat
I really have zero idea why I should care? I ignored all comments except when
I thought it would be funny. So people come to YouTube to comment??????? I
thought that was like only .05% who did?

Where am I being an ignorant YouTube user? Just seems like a big to do about
nothing.

~~~
Raphmedia
Her video are very educational and attracted quality comments. Now, those
quality comments are hidden, and low quality comments are moved to the top.

This is the issue.

------
ChuckMcM
This, perhaps more than anything else, should be a huge red flag for Google.
Vi Hart is the _epitome_ of what Youtube was born to be, an enabler of talent
discovery like no other. Losing this would be a huge blow.

------
knodi
This is the perfect time for Youtube alternatives to come into the market.

------
DanBC
I'm just waiting for MySpace to allow simple video sharing and a subscribe box
THAT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS, and they'll take over.

------
thrillgore
I just installed a userscript to hide the comments.

------
alexeisadeski3
Never saw the issue with YouTube comments. Always was much ado about nothing.
So people were immature - it's funny. So people were insulting - grow up,
they're having fun.

This whole movement to control YouTube comments reeks more of management's
personal embarrassment that their customers weren't as serious and high class
as they. Again, grow up. Not everyone is like you - not even your customers.

------
javanix
I don't think this is a problem with G+ per se, just a bad sorting algorithm.

What would a good comment sorting algorithm even look like for Youtube?
Something like HN/Reddit votes would be worth a try but I wouldn't be
surprised to see the trolls float to the top there either.

------
orblivion
Mediagoblin!

------
chankey_pathak
NO. Google is trolling. www.gifti.me/i/iPwWl.gif

