21 ms·

Vi Hart: cramming G+ into YouTube has made comments even worse, I'm leaving

315 points by wyclif 13y ago

baldfat 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
- shocks 13y ago
  boogie2988 disabled comments on all his videos because the hateful spiteful messages (personal attacks re. his weight, etc) all bubbled to the top. Many people are also linking to spam, pornography, and viruses. G+'s algorithm also bubbles these to the top because they get a large amount of responses.
- menubar 13y ago
  Really, I sometimes enjoy reading the stupid comments. Do we really want quality control censorship on comments for all the "I Put Fireworks Down My Pants" videos? I think not. (please ignore this retarded comment, faaaagots)
- blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  Discussion is sometimes helpful, I've found. It can add depth to the presentation. The uploader or the content creator can answer questions. I think comments can be extremely useful. It's a shame that Google is trying to force the G+ identity merger on Youtube users right now; every few times I use youtube, I have to answer a nagging pop-up with "Ask me later" (no way to disable the feature). Because I have a young child who is now getting into watching animal shows and children's cartoons on Youtube, I've had to enable the safety feature, which hides all comments behind a link. It's a pain, but it's the only way to avoid her seeing some appalling crap at the bottom of a perfectly innocent video. I'm sure she'll see it all when she's a teen, but I'd prefer her not to see it at age 8. That's the price of social media, I suppose; you have to take the good with the bad.
simias 13y ago
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.
- skizm 13y ago
  Search "YouTube feather beta". It removes pretty much everything from YouTube except the video and is an official Google feature. I didn't even notice this g+ thing till reddit and HN started going off about it.
  - markeganfuller 13y ago
    That is simply awesome, maybe there's some good left in Google after all.
  - aroch 13y ago
    Feather doesn't have the "large" video size, only standard and fullscreen. Which makes it less than ideal
    - rohitv 13y ago
      I usually just zoom in to the page to make the video larger :/ Is that any different from selecting the large option ?
    - TheCraiggers 13y ago
      Maybe for you... but for me this is freakin awesome and I'm glad it was posted.
merlish 13y ago
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.
zedpm 13y ago
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
- rplnt 13y ago
  I only miss the bigger-size player in feather. Still using it though.
  - mnsc 13y ago
    I miss it too, but maybe it could be added with a userscript?
  - rohitv 13y ago
    Can't you just zoom in to make the video size larger? That's what I usually do :/
- Trufa 13y ago
  I didn't know about that, can't thank you enough!
- josteink 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
Shish2k 13y ago
"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 13y ago
  "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.
  - rtpg 13y ago
    There's a large enough class of people that would tone down what they say if they were tagged about what they say ( what if I could link you back to some posts on Stormfront?), or if the person they were wishing to die had a name.
    - tokenizer 13y ago
      The bigger chilling effect is my situation. I would love to comment, but I'd rather not create potentially incriminating or embarrassing ties back to my personal life. People may think this is exclusively limiting trolling, but for me, it limits me discussing economics, politics, and controversial events that usually 30% of the population is always creating bad opinion about. At least with pro username websites, you can opt into real names. I feel like this is the optimum approach, and that all others are subversive to a completely free conversation, which is what the internet first championed.
orblivion 13y ago
Mediagoblin!
rtpg 13y ago
>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.
- rsl7 13y ago
  But now all those people who don't care about trolling with their real names now know your real name, too. So, win-win?
- king_jester 13y ago
  > 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 disagree. For myself personally, I have always believed that real name comment policies will do nothing to reduce rudeness or trolling. The primary reason is that the visibility of rudeness and trolls is what counts, not the raw number of trolls. Even if there are less actual people being rude as often, as long as those trolling kinds of comments surface it has the same net effect and doesn't change anything.
- cbhl 13y ago
  > 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.
j2kun 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    That's silly and untrue. EDIT: Mmh. Humor on the internet?!
    - dan00 13y ago
      It might be a satire on filtering comments by "certain" words.
      - wikwocket 13y ago
        Yeah, that's a clbuttic mistake.
    - spot 13y ago
      irony
chankey_pathak 13y ago
NO. Google is trolling. www.gifti.me/i/iPwWl.gif
deleted 13y ago
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joemaller1 13y ago
Why link BoingBoing and not directly to her actual blog post? 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/ http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...
- jawr 13y ago
  Might be to avoid that very, very bright background.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    Why do I suddenly taste lemons?
  - robotmay 13y ago
    I'm somehow seeing a blurry yellow line down the middle of the white area, which I think is an illusion caused by the yellow on the sides. It's quite painful to read.
- sampo 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
j2kun 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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+.
deleted 13y ago
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csmuk 13y ago
Oddly, I tend to use Bing video search to browse youtube and watch videos now. The experience is better.
talkingstove 13y ago
Title is just incorrect: She isn't leaving. She is only "maybe" turning off comments and moving discussion to Reddit.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  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?
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Or Reddit needs to focus on providing a good API and Disqus-like embedding so they can provide Reddit-as-a-service for other websites. Right now sites can throw a skin on a reddit community and wrap it in a domain-name, but it's not really set up for embedding.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    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.
YTerThrowaway 13y ago
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.
- jrs99 13y ago
  people bash google because it's becoming a waste land. There is no aversion to change, in my opinion. There's aversion to bad decisions.
  - oblio 13y ago
    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.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
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.
PilateDeGuerre 13y ago
This is blogspam. Original content: 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/ http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...
- wyclif 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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.)
InclinedPlane 13y ago
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.
herge 13y ago
Has anyone used any YouTube competitors? Ms. Hart wants to stream her videos through bittorent, but how much trouble is using vimeo instead?
- lambda 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    This probably happened because vimeo offered better quality encoding early on.
    - sesqu 13y ago
      It also has a lot to do with their terms. All content must be 100% original.
skore 13y ago
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/
- stcredzero 13y ago
  Since torrents eliminate the hosting overhead Not absolutely true. (Though a lot can be done with incentivizing the user base to make it mostly true.)
  - skore 13y ago
    There are a good number of channels who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, combined with the hunger for new content... I think you don't even need to do much incentivizing.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      There's an initial bootstrapping period before you get to those hundreds of thousands of subscribers, though.
      - 13y ago
vog 13y ago
Original article: 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/ http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw... HN Discussion to the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069
joelrunyon 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - joelrunyon 13y ago
    The benefit to youtube-type model is that there is an aggregator. There's a "channel" where people can bounce between interests. You can make the argument that you can utilize "the internet" as a channel - but I think it's been demonstrated that people prefer to have a slice that they know is going to be specifically video-based content.
  - drcube 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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".
myronbolitar 13y ago
Not that they wouldn't have ruined it, but Google must be kicking themselves for not trying more aggressively to buy Twitter years ago.
javanix 13y ago
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.
thrillgore 13y ago
I just installed a userscript to hide the comments.
peterwwillis 13y ago
Why do we even need comments on YouTube?
- bane 13y ago
  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.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  On videos with a few hundred or few thousand views comments can add to the experience (e.g. discussing a video of a show you went to with other people). Once a video has hit the level of 'like this comment to get it to the top so x sees it' comments are useless.
- mturmon 13y ago
  Smart remark. Comments probably increase retention and re-visits. A feature does not have to create a better experience for viewers with IQ above room temperature, in order to increase ad revenue.
- highstep 13y ago
  Comments on videos of the DIY nature are very helpful for increasing the breadth of information.
theklub 13y ago
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 13y ago
  +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/
- sp332 13y ago
  Disabling comments and allowing only approved comments are options that uploaders can choose if they want. http://i.imgur.com/nhRsdK4.png http://i.imgur.com/nhRsdK4.png
ceautery 13y ago
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
adamb_ 13y ago
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-broadband-diet/ http://allthingsd.com/20131111/netflix-youtube-half-your-bro...
tantalor 13y ago
promoting hateful inflammatory comments because they provoke responses Please don't feed the trolls.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
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.
perlpimp 13y ago
http://youtu.be/jQjocZXHOg4 http://youtu.be/jQjocZXHOg4 to the point video from discussion on the site about the article. 2c.
jamesbritt 13y ago
... 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.
sixQuarks 13y ago
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.
knodi 13y ago
This is the perfect time for Youtube alternatives to come into the market.
kunai 13y ago
Why not post her original comments? http://vihart.com/ http://vihart.com/
migrantgeek 13y ago
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 13y ago
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.
DanBC 13y ago
I'm just waiting for MySpace to allow simple video sharing and a subscribe box THAT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS, and they'll take over.
mcphilip 13y ago
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.
anigbrowl 13y ago
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).
jamesbritt 13y ago
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
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
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.
r0h1n 13y ago
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."
ChuckMcM 13y ago
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.
anonymous 13y ago
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.
just2n 13y ago
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 13y ago
  > 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 13y ago
    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.
tn13 13y ago
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.

315 points by wyclif 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
shocks 13y ago
boogie2988 disabled comments on all his videos because the hateful spiteful messages (personal attacks re. his weight, etc) all bubbled to the top. Many people are also linking to spam, pornography, and viruses. G+'s algorithm also bubbles these to the top because they get a large amount of responses.
menubar 13y ago
Really, I sometimes enjoy reading the stupid comments. Do we really want quality control censorship on comments for all the "I Put Fireworks Down My Pants" videos? I think not. (please ignore this retarded comment, faaaagots)
blisterpeanuts 13y ago
Discussion is sometimes helpful, I've found. It can add depth to the presentation. The uploader or the content creator can answer questions. I think comments can be extremely useful. It's a shame that Google is trying to force the G+ identity merger on Youtube users right now; every few times I use youtube, I have to answer a nagging pop-up with "Ask me later" (no way to disable the feature). Because I have a young child who is now getting into watching animal shows and children's cartoons on Youtube, I've had to enable the safety feature, which hides all comments behind a link. It's a pain, but it's the only way to avoid her seeing some appalling crap at the bottom of a perfectly innocent video. I'm sure she'll see it all when she's a teen, but I'd prefer her not to see it at age 8. That's the price of social media, I suppose; you have to take the good with the bad.

simias 13y ago

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.

skizm 13y ago
Search "YouTube feather beta". It removes pretty much everything from YouTube except the video and is an official Google feature. I didn't even notice this g+ thing till reddit and HN started going off about it.
- markeganfuller 13y ago
  That is simply awesome, maybe there's some good left in Google after all.
- aroch 13y ago
  Feather doesn't have the "large" video size, only standard and fullscreen. Which makes it less than ideal
  - rohitv 13y ago
    I usually just zoom in to the page to make the video larger :/ Is that any different from selecting the large option ?
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago
    Maybe for you... but for me this is freakin awesome and I'm glad it was posted.

merlish 13y ago

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.

zedpm 13y ago

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

rplnt 13y ago
I only miss the bigger-size player in feather. Still using it though.
- mnsc 13y ago
  I miss it too, but maybe it could be added with a userscript?
- rohitv 13y ago
  Can't you just zoom in to make the video size larger? That's what I usually do :/
Trufa 13y ago
I didn't know about that, can't thank you enough!
josteink 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

Shish2k 13y ago

"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 13y ago
"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.
- rtpg 13y ago
  There's a large enough class of people that would tone down what they say if they were tagged about what they say ( what if I could link you back to some posts on Stormfront?), or if the person they were wishing to die had a name.
  - tokenizer 13y ago
    The bigger chilling effect is my situation. I would love to comment, but I'd rather not create potentially incriminating or embarrassing ties back to my personal life. People may think this is exclusively limiting trolling, but for me, it limits me discussing economics, politics, and controversial events that usually 30% of the population is always creating bad opinion about. At least with pro username websites, you can opt into real names. I feel like this is the optimum approach, and that all others are subversive to a completely free conversation, which is what the internet first championed.

orblivion 13y ago

Mediagoblin!

rtpg 13y ago

>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.

rsl7 13y ago
But now all those people who don't care about trolling with their real names now know your real name, too. So, win-win?
king_jester 13y ago
> 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 disagree. For myself personally, I have always believed that real name comment policies will do nothing to reduce rudeness or trolling. The primary reason is that the visibility of rudeness and trolls is what counts, not the raw number of trolls. Even if there are less actual people being rude as often, as long as those trolling kinds of comments surface it has the same net effect and doesn't change anything.
cbhl 13y ago
> 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.

j2kun 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  That's silly and untrue. EDIT: Mmh. Humor on the internet?!
  - dan00 13y ago
    It might be a satire on filtering comments by "certain" words.
    - wikwocket 13y ago
      Yeah, that's a clbuttic mistake.
  - spot 13y ago
    irony

chankey_pathak 13y ago

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

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

joemaller1 13y ago

Why link BoingBoing and not directly to her actual blog post? 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/ http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...

jawr 13y ago
Might be to avoid that very, very bright background.
- aaronem 13y ago
  Why do I suddenly taste lemons?
- robotmay 13y ago
  I'm somehow seeing a blurry yellow line down the middle of the white area, which I think is an illusion caused by the yellow on the sides. It's quite painful to read.
sampo 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

j2kun 13y ago

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 13y ago
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+.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

csmuk 13y ago

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

talkingstove 13y ago

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

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
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?
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Or Reddit needs to focus on providing a good API and Disqus-like embedding so they can provide Reddit-as-a-service for other websites. Right now sites can throw a skin on a reddit community and wrap it in a domain-name, but it's not really set up for embedding.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  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.

YTerThrowaway 13y ago

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.

jrs99 13y ago
people bash google because it's becoming a waste land. There is no aversion to change, in my opinion. There's aversion to bad decisions.
- oblio 13y ago
  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.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

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.

PilateDeGuerre 13y ago

This is blogspam. Original content: 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/ http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...

wyclif 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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.)

InclinedPlane 13y ago

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.

herge 13y ago

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

lambda 13y ago
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 13y ago
  This probably happened because vimeo offered better quality encoding early on.
  - sesqu 13y ago
    It also has a lot to do with their terms. All content must be 100% original.

skore 13y ago

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/

stcredzero 13y ago
Since torrents eliminate the hosting overhead Not absolutely true. (Though a lot can be done with incentivizing the user base to make it mostly true.)
- skore 13y ago
  There are a good number of channels who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, combined with the hunger for new content... I think you don't even need to do much incentivizing.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    There's an initial bootstrapping period before you get to those hundreds of thousands of subscribers, though.
    - 13y ago

vog 13y ago

Original article: 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/ http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw... HN Discussion to the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069

joelrunyon 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
- joelrunyon 13y ago
  The benefit to youtube-type model is that there is an aggregator. There's a "channel" where people can bounce between interests. You can make the argument that you can utilize "the internet" as a channel - but I think it's been demonstrated that people prefer to have a slice that they know is going to be specifically video-based content.
- drcube 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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".

myronbolitar 13y ago

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

javanix 13y ago

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.

thrillgore 13y ago

I just installed a userscript to hide the comments.

peterwwillis 13y ago

Why do we even need comments on YouTube?

bane 13y ago
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.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
On videos with a few hundred or few thousand views comments can add to the experience (e.g. discussing a video of a show you went to with other people). Once a video has hit the level of 'like this comment to get it to the top so x sees it' comments are useless.
mturmon 13y ago
Smart remark. Comments probably increase retention and re-visits. A feature does not have to create a better experience for viewers with IQ above room temperature, in order to increase ad revenue.
highstep 13y ago
Comments on videos of the DIY nature are very helpful for increasing the breadth of information.

theklub 13y ago

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 13y ago
+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/
sp332 13y ago
Disabling comments and allowing only approved comments are options that uploaders can choose if they want. http://i.imgur.com/nhRsdK4.png http://i.imgur.com/nhRsdK4.png

ceautery 13y ago

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

adamb_ 13y ago

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-broadband-diet/ http://allthingsd.com/20131111/netflix-youtube-half-your-bro...

tantalor 13y ago

promoting hateful inflammatory comments because they provoke responses Please don't feed the trolls.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

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.

perlpimp 13y ago

http://youtu.be/jQjocZXHOg4 http://youtu.be/jQjocZXHOg4 to the point video from discussion on the site about the article. 2c.

jamesbritt 13y ago

... 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.

sixQuarks 13y ago

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.

knodi 13y ago

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

kunai 13y ago

Why not post her original comments? http://vihart.com/ http://vihart.com/

migrantgeek 13y ago

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 13y ago

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.

DanBC 13y ago

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

mcphilip 13y ago

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.

anigbrowl 13y ago

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).

jamesbritt 13y ago

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

dinkumthinkum 13y ago

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.

r0h1n 13y ago

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."

ChuckMcM 13y ago

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.

anonymous 13y ago

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.

just2n 13y ago

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 13y ago
> 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 13y ago
  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.

tn13 13y ago

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.