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.
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.
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?
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)?
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.
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).
I'm not a heavy YouTube user, but I think I'm in a similar situation. If I am on YouTube I often want to read the comments (I have no moral problem with any of them), but if I'm searching for something on Google I don't usually want a bunch of spam/porn/whatever gets filtered by SafeSearch in the way of what I'm actually searching for. When I search I'm looking for something, and when I'm on YouTube I'm usually wasting time...they're very different use cases.
Well, since I've been watching videos on Youtube I noticed something. Pre-aquisition Youtube comments were the most retarded and insensitive things one Earth. I can hardly think of another discussion forum on the Internet with such bad comments. Mostly hateful retarded immature ones.
Then Google added upvotes - suddenly there was some sort of filter and the millions (literally) of pages of filth were hidden. Sometimes the top comment was even interesting or funny.
Google becoming a waste land? Maybe. But that's only if you conveniently forget that Youtube was a radioactive sewer filled with all sort of mutated, barely functional animals and plants. I'd rather have silence than that.
Youtube needed the open comments for the sale (comments drive views), but Google doesn't need sheer numbers, it needs quality. Higher quality comments, higher quality content, much higher possibility of monetizing. Google is moving in the right direction.
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.