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After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- defqon 7y agoThis was actually a pretty well-used feature back around ~2010. The problem was that it was hidden away more and more every time the site was redesigned, so its discoverability (and presumably use) basically dropped to zero over time.
- dspillett 7y agoI assumed it had already been quietly dropped, rather than just effectively hidden. It would be interesting to see how much use it actually gets these days.
- cameronbrown 7y agoYep. They dropped it a long long time ago and re-introduced this in 2017(?) as a different feature.
- cjbprime 7y agoWeird. YouTube had a messaging feature?
- SenHeng 7y agoExactly, I wonder how many people even know of this. From what I've seen following a few youtubers, most of them request that you contact them through Twitter or Instragram DMs.
- MegaThorx 7y agoI've used it ages ago. Some youtubers read them and made response videos out of them (Q/A). But later some of them disable it as the only got a flood of messages through it.
- hrrypttr 7y agoI had no idea about this too. I think it makes sense then that this is being removed. The feature is not well known but it must be putting a lot of burden on their team to keep it clean and protect it from abuse.
- fouc 7y agoIt might've been used more during live feeds?
- yoz-y 7y agoI work for YouTube and I did not know this was possible -_-; Or maybe I knew and forgot.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y agoJust reintroduce the feature a few years later when everyone forgets. You’ll get a promotion from what I hear.
- silon42 7y agoI just noticed it being used by a few channels in last few months... and it's gone.
- mirimir 7y agoFunny. NoScript blocks this link as XSS.
- pcdoodle 7y agoOne step further to being "alone together".
- jamisteven 7y agoDamnit, how will I ever communicate with all my peeps from the tube of you.
- ninedays 7y agoYet another feature being removed that noone ever remembers using.
- gtirloni 7y agoSounds good, right? Why "yet"?
- VBprogrammer 7y agoI don't imagine the average consumer would ever notice but I wonder how much it is used by youtubers to arrange collaboration between different channels in similar spaces. At least as a way of establishing initial contact. It would be a shame to see collaboration between channels drop as that, in my opinion, is one of the best parts of the medium.
- rubberstock 7y agoHow come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network? Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment. Then they can offer an optional! integration with their other messenger apps which would allow them to compete with facebook.
- cameronbrown 7y agoYouTube with a bit more work would make an amazing social network. Like games, people tend to share/centralise their conversations around a type of media - it's why Steam & Discord are now technically popular social networks. A proper investment in a social sharing feature centred around your friends on YouTube would be a great idea. Not only for watching together with friends but for sharing it privately (just look at how popular video is on Snapchat). They even have a stories feature already - but for YouTubers to talk to fans!
- freeflight 7y agoI also don't understand this, just like the decision to remove certain features over time. Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it. While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders. I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment. [0] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did-the-youtube-comment-translate-button-go https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did...
- detritus 7y agoI couldn't even manage the other day to get Google Translate to translate a YouTube page so I could read comments mostly written in cyrillic to a Russian video about the protests over there. Perhaps I was doing something wrong (I don't think so), perhaps it's because I use Firefox and this was a gentle nudge to get me to try in Chrome, or perhaps it's just another one of Google's infuriating and perplexing 'quirks'.
- vaastav 7y agoTIL you could send messages on YouTube
- tus88 7y agoI take their word for it but still no idea what it means. Do I have a youtube inbox I have not been checking my whole life?
- kkarakk 7y agoIt was more obvious in the mobile app - there was an entire tab devoted to messaging. I still don't know how to access it from desktop
- falcolas 7y agoIt was not well exposed, and unavailable completely on the iPad version of their app, but it was quite useful between my wife and I for sharing videos asynchronously.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoYoutube's UI is a fucking disaster, like most of Google's interfaces tbh. To this day, I don't know how to get to a list of all my videos; I either literally google for it, or just click around randomly until I finally find it. It doesn't help that the Google+ profile they forced on me _also_ has a YouTube account, and I've uploaded some videos to the wrong one, so I get to do the dance twice.
- cronix 7y agoOn the website, the first option in the dropdown when you click your profile is "Your Channel" which has all of your videos?
- misterdoubt 7y ago
- utf985 7y agoThis is sad. As someone who loves browsing the "hidden" side of YT where videos and channels with sub 3 and 4 digit viewcount lurk and discovering weird obscure content, this feature was a godsend. I have been able to contact users that otherwise leave absolutely no contact info on their pages to ask them about certain content they have uploaded on multiple occasions. I really dislike how stuff like twitter and Instagram have become the standard form of reaching anyone, as I have neither and your messages can very easily become ignored due to the very nature of how these two social networks operate.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoThis is the equivalent of Nintendo disabling profile pictures because of people abusing it with penis pictures.
- wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y agoNot really? 1) you can still have profile pictures from a limited though large set of their IP plus highly custom Mii and 2) the expected user bases and interaction methods between platforms is not at all comparable.
- kryogen1c 7y ago> 2) the expected user bases and interaction methods between platforms is not at all comparable. Exactly. Pictures visible through normal use are not the same as an inbox you have to go out of your way to read. At the very least, the sensibe thing is to make messages opt-in or whitelist only. Removing the feature to prevent harassment seems like a scapegoat. I wonder if this was being utilized as an illegal communications channel and YT\alphabet is worried about legal exposure
- ihuman 7y agoWhen did Nintendo have custom profile pictures?
- maniflames 7y ago
- lr 7y agoStep 6 seems to be misspelled: ‘Select “Creative archive”.’
- znpy 7y ago"Google continues the war against its own users", as someone will write about this article.
- agumonkey 7y agoGoogle services needs a Mean Time Before Finish indicator.
- OliverJones 7y agoThey offer no motivation for the change. Are they trying to make it harder to weaponize nasty content? Or do they just want to save a few bucks by stopping maintenance on a feature?
- realshowbiz 7y agoDoes anyone have insights or ideas about why this change is being made?
- FreakyT 7y agoYou’d think they’d simply migrate to one of their other redundant chat products! But no, I suppose just killing the feature with no meaningful replacement strategy is the new GOOGLE WAY™. I can’t wait to invest all my money in a library of Stadia games that will surely last forever. /s
- tomschlick 7y ago> You’d think they’d simply migrate to one of their other redundant chat products! Too risky. They are probably going to deprecate those for another chat product in 6 months.
- calibas 7y agoYeah, why they don't just integrate YouTube with Google+. What could possibly go wrong?
- Inhibit 7y agoIs it my imagination or is Google devoid of the ability to integrate it's different "products"?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fortran77 7y agoSad. They simply should give content producers the option of whether they want to receive messages or not. (Similar to how you can turn comments on or off). This way, individuals who received "targeted harassment" could be free of it, and other individuals who don't have this problem, or are more thick-skinned or tolerant, can receive messages. (One complaint in a recent lawsuit against YouTube is that Google allow users to "harass" content creators. See https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/lgbtq-youtube-lawsuit-1203302184/ https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/lgbtq-youtube-lawsuit-... ). I'm sympathetic to their concerns, and turning off the ability to write messages or contact is one solution. There are already some controls available. I've used these messages quite a bit to contact people with similar "niche" interests (restoring old electronic equipment from WWII era through the 60s) and it's very useful.
- magduf 7y agoThat's impossible to do. A feature like that would be fairly simple to implement, and would make sense, so it can't be done by Google. Google products always have to have some kind of glaring missing feature. An example I found not long ago is with Google Photos. If you create an album, you can offer to share that album with other people, through their Google account, their phone number, their email, etc. If they accept the invitation, it notifies you and their little circle darkens. If not, it stays light, and still stays in your list of people you've shared with. There's no way to actually remove these unused invites, and these people just stick around as "ghosts" forever. The only way to clean this mess up, according to Google, is to turn off all sharing of your album, and then re-share with everyone you want to share it with, so they all have to re-accept the share invitation (and you have to manually enter in every email address, phone number, etc. again). There's no way to just remove one of these "ghosts", even though you'd think this is a very basic admin task. There's forums where people have complained about this for years, and there is a Google person on there who just complains about people using the forum for complaining like this instead of filing an "official" feature request (which as we all know never goes anywhere), even though this Google person could very well do this herself instead of complaining about all the complaints.
- bhalithan 7y ago
- unstatusthequo 7y agoKinda wish they would disable comments. Those tend to bring out sides of humanity that rarely show off any benevolence.
- whenchamenia 7y agoAnd yet, you comment, showing us that side. Not sure if blissfully unaware or diliberately meta.
- username90 7y agoWhat kind of videos are you watching with toxic comments? I never see them in the topics I watch, only relevant or helpful ones.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ilikehurdles 7y agoIt's so funny seeing Zawinski's Law hold up after all this time (replacing "email" with "messaging"), and Google again fighting it. I wish the culture of SaaS development would move away from this try-to-do-everything mentality that always leads to anciliary features being modified or removed, and instead focus on honing their core offering. No user cheers a feature going away -- either they're ambivalent about it or annoyed for having to switch away.