7 ms·

Because YouTube comments were completely useless, and now the company is trying to make them useful / interesting. If I go to a viral video, and I see comments

Because YouTube comments were completely useless, and now the company is trying to make them useful / interesting. If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. That was completely impossible, the old way.

Larrikin 13y ago
If I'm not talking about it to my friend already I find that comment just as useful or important as a random stranger.
ma2rten 13y ago
If that were really the sole motivation, they could have just linked G+ in addition to other social networks to your old account.
leephillips 13y ago
Yes, the internet makes it so convenient to remain within one's echo chamber.
homosaur 13y ago
I don't think G+ has much to do with it, more the self-moderation, but I will say the commenting on YT has improved significantly in the last few months. That of course means we've moved from "abysmal" to "shitty" but hey, progress is progress.
andor 13y ago
If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. Or really creepy. a- Imagine you're going to a real world bookstore. You look at the back cover of a few books and all the reviews are by your Google+ "friends". Customized for you to increase the chances you're buying it. (If ads are going everywhere and you try to ignore them, what will be left?) b- In your holidays you're traveling to another continent. After arriving, you're surprised that you see the faces of your Facebook stalkers everywhere. Would you like that? c- Your government rolls out new mandatory ID smartcards for both the offline and online worlds. Soon after they require everybody to sign their TCP packets with those cards. A friendly smiling illustration of a computer asks you to swipe your card to login to your OS. Have a safe journey online!
- jannotti 13y ago
  a - That would be awesome. b - That would be awesome (since I assume you mean the beter direct analogy, which would be that any of my Facebook friend's statements about being there are visible. Now I know who to chat with about restaurants, sights, etc.) c - Can you say strawman? Making up a dystopian future and placing it alongside something you don't like doesn't make the thing you don't like any more like it. Youtube comments are universally derided as trash. This might make it better. It might also simply stop a lot of comments. And in fact, probably both.
  - dublinben 13y ago
    C - This is more or less already the case in South Korea. You can't really use the Internet without a national ID card.
    - jannotti 13y ago
      Do you suspect this was in preparation for the inevitable day when Google would require real names on youtube comments?
- goatforce5 13y ago
  I was recently reading reviews online before booking a hotel in Maui. I was on TripAdvisor and I guess I was also logged in to Facebook at the time, and TripAdvisor highlighted one of my friends had reviewed a hotel in Maui. Turns out Tina liked a hotel that was on my shortlist, and her review was absolutely the factor that made me book that hotel. Thanks Tina! (As it happens, I booked it via Hotwire where you theoretically don't know the exactly hotel you're getting until you pay. With a little searching you can normally work out which hotel it is, based on the area and facilities of the hotel.)
  - _mulder_ 13y ago
    Personally that would be a big negative for me. I like to go to different places than my friends. Yes it's irrational, but I find it boring talking about something we both know; "Did you stay at the.. oh yeh, of course you did. The view from the bar was... oh yeh you know that too"
Wilya 13y ago
The overlap between people who enjoy the same videos as me and people I trust enough to them tell my real name is almost non-existent. And I'm not sure I'm the only one thinking that way. If I want to talk about a video, I can, you know, share it (I can even share it on Google+, that way Google loses nothing). If it turns out to be a really cool video, I'll even maybe get to impress my friends that way.
- harimau 13y ago
  You're not alone. I don't quite understand the war against anonymity on the internet. Seeing someone's real name and photo next to a comment doesn't make what they say or do on the net any more civil.
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    "This is a great Python module." -Guido van Rossum "This is a cool display technology." -John Carmack "Here's a great link to send to skeptics about global climate change." -Al Gore "This article is pseudo-science at best, and lies at worst." -Bill Nye "I'm sorry, Pluto." -Neil deGrasse Tyson Without attribution, none of those comments are remotely interesting. (They're all made up, but you get the idea.) When I Search for things now, I see top results from previous co-workers, who have Shared things. Those results LEAP out at me.
jerf 13y ago
"If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. That was completely impossible, the old way." I keep seeing companies pushing this idea on us, but I just don't get it. The math doesn't work. There are umpty millions of pieces of "content" that might be reviewed. I have at most a few hundred actual friends. (I imagine those who push beyond that have also pushed well beyond the intimacy frontier where they really care what you think about YouTube Video #283572738.) The median number of reviews that a given friend is likely to generate in a sufficiently formal manner that Google can figure it out is zero. If you live in some sort of bizarre homogenous bubble where all your friends are just like you and have effectively the same tastes, and a lot of your friends insist on reviewing every last Youtube video they see, and yet, have some sort of diversity of opinion that you might actually care about, this might work. But even stereotypical college students don't live like this. Maybe frat houses, but even then, you've got family circles, other non-frat friends, etc, and I doubt your frat brothers are going to be sitting there churning out enough reviews on things that you all care about that seeing a review from someone you "know" is going to be anything other than an exceptional occurrence, and a review you care about even less so. ("Yes, my frat brothers love the latest Call of Duty. I could tell that by the way we all played it for 14 hours straight last night. I did not need Google+ to tell me that.") (If they did sit there and review everything, it would just turn into a backchannel for chat anyhow... "This beer is awesome, just ask John about last night... here's a link to some photos that the beer company would pay good money not to have associated with their beer...") I'm not saying that there's absolutely nobody this will be useful for, but it seems to be a very, very specialized group of people hardly worth the immense effort being put into this idea by companies. The amount of possible "things to review" just swamps the number of friends a person can have, and standard lurker/poster ratios tend to imply that "nobody" writes reviews. (And I gotta think these sites have even worse lurker/poster ratios than something like Usenet or HN, probably by an order of magnitude or two or three.)
- leokun 13y ago
  > I have at most a few hundred actual friends. I was going to complain about the impossibility of being intimately acquainted with hundreds of people enough to call them friend only to find out my dictionary had a new definition for friend: > "a contact associated with a social networking website" In which case, carry on I guess.
bryogenic 13y ago
A feature that "would be really cool" is one that should be opt-in. I think this is the real issue that shows it self over and over again: forcing users into services they do not want. IMO Google could have avoided most of the backlash by making every youtube account a G+ account too, then if you want to link the two, have a simple merge account functionality between G+ and YouTube. The Charlie Foxtrot of forcing real names and linked accounts has obvious motivations for Google, but the backlash was predictable and isn't going away.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Larrikin 13y ago

If I'm not talking about it to my friend already I find that comment just as useful or important as a random stranger.

ma2rten 13y ago

If that were really the sole motivation, they could have just linked G+ in addition to other social networks to your old account.

leephillips 13y ago

Yes, the internet makes it so convenient to remain within one's echo chamber.

homosaur 13y ago

I don't think G+ has much to do with it, more the self-moderation, but I will say the commenting on YT has improved significantly in the last few months. That of course means we've moved from "abysmal" to "shitty" but hey, progress is progress.

andor 13y ago

If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. Or really creepy. a- Imagine you're going to a real world bookstore. You look at the back cover of a few books and all the reviews are by your Google+ "friends". Customized for you to increase the chances you're buying it. (If ads are going everywhere and you try to ignore them, what will be left?) b- In your holidays you're traveling to another continent. After arriving, you're surprised that you see the faces of your Facebook stalkers everywhere. Would you like that? c- Your government rolls out new mandatory ID smartcards for both the offline and online worlds. Soon after they require everybody to sign their TCP packets with those cards. A friendly smiling illustration of a computer asks you to swipe your card to login to your OS. Have a safe journey online!

jannotti 13y ago
a - That would be awesome. b - That would be awesome (since I assume you mean the beter direct analogy, which would be that any of my Facebook friend's statements about being there are visible. Now I know who to chat with about restaurants, sights, etc.) c - Can you say strawman? Making up a dystopian future and placing it alongside something you don't like doesn't make the thing you don't like any more like it. Youtube comments are universally derided as trash. This might make it better. It might also simply stop a lot of comments. And in fact, probably both.
- dublinben 13y ago
  C - This is more or less already the case in South Korea. You can't really use the Internet without a national ID card.
  - jannotti 13y ago
    Do you suspect this was in preparation for the inevitable day when Google would require real names on youtube comments?
goatforce5 13y ago
I was recently reading reviews online before booking a hotel in Maui. I was on TripAdvisor and I guess I was also logged in to Facebook at the time, and TripAdvisor highlighted one of my friends had reviewed a hotel in Maui. Turns out Tina liked a hotel that was on my shortlist, and her review was absolutely the factor that made me book that hotel. Thanks Tina! (As it happens, I booked it via Hotwire where you theoretically don't know the exactly hotel you're getting until you pay. With a little searching you can normally work out which hotel it is, based on the area and facilities of the hotel.)
- _mulder_ 13y ago
  Personally that would be a big negative for me. I like to go to different places than my friends. Yes it's irrational, but I find it boring talking about something we both know; "Did you stay at the.. oh yeh, of course you did. The view from the bar was... oh yeh you know that too"

Wilya 13y ago

The overlap between people who enjoy the same videos as me and people I trust enough to them tell my real name is almost non-existent. And I'm not sure I'm the only one thinking that way. If I want to talk about a video, I can, you know, share it (I can even share it on Google+, that way Google loses nothing). If it turns out to be a really cool video, I'll even maybe get to impress my friends that way.

harimau 13y ago
You're not alone. I don't quite understand the war against anonymity on the internet. Seeing someone's real name and photo next to a comment doesn't make what they say or do on the net any more civil.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  "This is a great Python module." -Guido van Rossum "This is a cool display technology." -John Carmack "Here's a great link to send to skeptics about global climate change." -Al Gore "This article is pseudo-science at best, and lies at worst." -Bill Nye "I'm sorry, Pluto." -Neil deGrasse Tyson Without attribution, none of those comments are remotely interesting. (They're all made up, but you get the idea.) When I Search for things now, I see top results from previous co-workers, who have Shared things. Those results LEAP out at me.

jerf 13y ago

"If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. That was completely impossible, the old way." I keep seeing companies pushing this idea on us, but I just don't get it. The math doesn't work. There are umpty millions of pieces of "content" that might be reviewed. I have at most a few hundred actual friends. (I imagine those who push beyond that have also pushed well beyond the intimacy frontier where they really care what you think about YouTube Video #283572738.) The median number of reviews that a given friend is likely to generate in a sufficiently formal manner that Google can figure it out is zero. If you live in some sort of bizarre homogenous bubble where all your friends are just like you and have effectively the same tastes, and a lot of your friends insist on reviewing every last Youtube video they see, and yet, have some sort of diversity of opinion that you might actually care about, this might work. But even stereotypical college students don't live like this. Maybe frat houses, but even then, you've got family circles, other non-frat friends, etc, and I doubt your frat brothers are going to be sitting there churning out enough reviews on things that you all care about that seeing a review from someone you "know" is going to be anything other than an exceptional occurrence, and a review you care about even less so. ("Yes, my frat brothers love the latest Call of Duty. I could tell that by the way we all played it for 14 hours straight last night. I did not need Google+ to tell me that.") (If they did sit there and review everything, it would just turn into a backchannel for chat anyhow... "This beer is awesome, just ask John about last night... here's a link to some photos that the beer company would pay good money not to have associated with their beer...") I'm not saying that there's absolutely nobody this will be useful for, but it seems to be a very, very specialized group of people hardly worth the immense effort being put into this idea by companies. The amount of possible "things to review" just swamps the number of friends a person can have, and standard lurker/poster ratios tend to imply that "nobody" writes reviews. (And I gotta think these sites have even worse lurker/poster ratios than something like Usenet or HN, probably by an order of magnitude or two or three.)

leokun 13y ago
> I have at most a few hundred actual friends. I was going to complain about the impossibility of being intimately acquainted with hundreds of people enough to call them friend only to find out my dictionary had a new definition for friend: > "a contact associated with a social networking website" In which case, carry on I guess.

bryogenic 13y ago

A feature that "would be really cool" is one that should be opt-in. I think this is the real issue that shows it self over and over again: forcing users into services they do not want. IMO Google could have avoided most of the backlash by making every youtube account a G+ account too, then if you want to link the two, have a simple merge account functionality between G+ and YouTube. The Charlie Foxtrot of forcing real names and linked accounts has obvious motivations for Google, but the backlash was predictable and isn't going away.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]