YouTube removes all_comments feature | Hacker News Reader

YouTube removes all_comments feature

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67 pointsuserbinator51 comments

The all_comments page was accessible from any browser, not even requiring JS. Now the only option is AJAX-loaded comments. IMHO it's another following of a sad trend to replace simple, reliable functionality with more complex and less accessible ones.

This reminds me of Twitter experimenting with full-AJAX loading of tweets a while ago...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798891

...then reverting 2 years later:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614037

It is more effective bandwidth wise because the data can be limited based on connection speed. However a few things they are lacking is a page method where the user could jump to a certain page instead of having to click load more a handful of times to achieve the desired page. As well as having a back fall system for users with browsers that cannot support such functionality. It's a good feature just needs fine tuning to be considered a viable replacement.

It is more effective bandwidth wise because the data can be limited based on connection speed.

Forums since the early days of the Web could do this too - only showing the first n posts, and paging to let you view more. And they didn't require JavaScript or any of the other fancy new features browsers have today.

Edit: How much bandwidth would be taken up by loading a few hundred plaintext comments, keeping in mind this is a YouTube page containing an embedded video which will be at least an order of magnitude bigger?

As well as having a back fall system for users with browsers that cannot support such functionality.

That's what all_comments was.

The video is on a cdn and is highly cacheable. The comments are highly dynamic and rely on far more db fetches presumably. You'll notice Google put these under the fold and dynamically ajax them in when you scroll down because they are probably actually expensive on the actual app servers or some resource. The devil is always in the details.

The main resource is client bandwidth; it's preferable to spend it on loading media and not the below-the-fold comments.

You can transfer less through ajax and render using templates already on the client side instead of using unnecessary bandwidth... They are concerned about showing ALL comments at once I was referring to a paging system for a fall back system. I'm sure it's costing them more than necessary to be allowing all comments to return when you have an immense amount comments on a video.

Pls read this rant (and do not take it personally): http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Obligatory post: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Much better, thanks to actual margins so the text isn't all pressed up against the side of the browser window reminding you what a bezel is.

Is there any research into less contrast being better? I keep trying to convince my boss that this is the case, but I can't find a study to back it up. My argument has always been that today's UIs are generally not using 100% contrast, so people set up their screen brightness to match that - when you then come with 100% black on white, it is too extreme on these same screen settings.

I would explain it in terms of paper. I have yet to meet someone who illuminates paper by shining a bright white light from behind it. Instead it is lit by daylight or reading lights, which are often a shade that makes the paper seem pleasantly off-white.

It follows that making your computer or web design a slight off-white is easier on the eyes, particularly in the case of a text-heavy design.

This was a really useful feature. By seeing all the comments, you could ctrl+F and find ones you were looking for. I.e. comments by a specific person or about a specific topic. And before the days of Plus, it was necessary to find people that had replied to your comments, or read comments in the proper order. It sort of still is, because of how mangled comments are with their weird threading and sorting system.

It's also very useful for search engines. Comments on the video determine what keywords the video should be indexed by. This follows their move a few years ago of removing the tags from video descriptions, which also seriously hurts search engines.

Now most comments will probably not be indexed. I found this necessary awhile ago when I was searching for something embarrassing I wrote years ago and wanted to delete.

I also just generally dislike the trend of infinite scrolling and very confusing sorting systems. I used to have a very hard time finding old posts on Facebook because of that. The all_comments page offered an alternative for that, but now you have no choice.

I'm sure there will be a bunch of comments complaining about youtube comments, or people not understanding why anyone would want to read them. There really is a big problem with the quality of youtube comments. That's because most of youtube is lowest-common-denominator stuff with no moderation.

But there are sections of youtube that aren't terrible. There are academic lectures on youtube. There are channels about math, programming, science, and every obscure subject you can think of. I've found some of the most insightful ideas from youtube videos. And the comments on videos like that will generally be better, reflecting the audience of people that watch those things. Video creators use comments to get feedback and talk to other people interested in that subject.

Not having YouTube comments load seems like a feature not a bug.

I've been using this[1] extension for some time now. It's awesome when there's already a submission for the video.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alientube-for-yout...

Except if you participate in the discussion and dislike censorship, no matter what it is said.

The parent was surely joking about, err, "quality" of average YouTube comments thread.

Sure, but I have no issues with the "quality" of the average YouTube comments thread.

I don't want to censor (from YT comments) people whose comments I disagree with, or consider stupid or shallow, or even people that are undeniably racist or ignorant or whatever.

If I ran YouTube I would censor the living heck out of it. The lack of effective moderation has turned the comments section into a niche tool. Many people, maybe the majority, aren't eager to add a new comment in the midst of a wall of obscenity... it isn't worth it. I like the "biker bar" analogy, per http://www.chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/

When it comes to law, I'm against almost any form of censorship, and wish we had less of it than we do now. So I would be strongly against any law that would force YouTube to censor themselves.

I wouldn't support a law banning doctors from blasting DubStep in their offices. But I wouldn't choose a doctor who did so.

I don't support forcing companies to censor users, but I prefer to visit ones that moderate their comments.

YouTube is a local government. Instead of censoring content, YouTube should provide tools for video publishers and users to form the commenting niches they want, and help people avoid reading comments they don't want to read.

Sure, if they implement that effectively, your way works for me too.

I have no problem if 10% of videos have all the comments from the "worst" 10% of YouTube users. It just turns me off to have the "worst" 10% spraying bile and stupidity over 90% of videos on Youtube, scaring off the "best" 10% of users from leaving their own comments.

Note: I invented these percentages, and "best/worst" is subjective.

>If I ran YouTube I would censor the living heck out of it. The lack of effective moderation has turned the comments section into a niche tool.

If by "niche tools" you mean "billions of people, of all races, countries, beliefs, politics, religion, ideology, etc" participate in it, and no single ideology or ethics prevails, unlike in 99.999% of internet sites, then I agree.

As bad as a lot of Youtube comments are, it's perfectly possible to moderate them well and have a thoughtful discussion using them, which removing this feature makes more difficult.

True. I'd rather have that feature if I was a content creator to get an overall picture of my viewership and whos watching my content

I don't understand the problem. Why doesn't the author just upgrade his browser? He doesn't explain why that's not an option.

This is what they added in the release after the one he's using. http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/1100/

Not only is he choosing a less stable browser, he's also choosing a non-HTML5 compliant one.

Reminds me of this Swift on Security tweet: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/69547522814777753...

So what? What if he were to use curl or wget? What then?

I don't believe anyone seriously uses curl or wget to browse the internet outside of edge cases.

If he really wants to read YouTube comments, why not open a separate browser for YouTube? Why not make your own CLI interface that pretends to be the "extraload"ing code?

I think it's perfectly fine that people have to actively exert effort to stay on a previous browser. Because those people are the reason IE8 and IE7 and IE6 were issues for the longest time.

If you don't like the everchanging web and the fact that it's built on crappy standards, then build your own thing. (This is a point I fully agree with: the web is an awful application platform as it is now.) But why would you make the experience more difficult for everyone else?

Edge cases like Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html):

> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.

Even wget can (and does) have critical vulnerabilities:

https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2014/...

>I know, Opera 10.63 is really old, but it's the last desirable browser in the world…

Personal preference I guess.

If you hadn't used Opera before it became yet-another-WebKit-shell, you wouldn't understand. Going to a higher version number would be more of a downgrade.

Don't know for sure, but IIRC, opera 10 was one of the last good versions of opera before their new management started ruining stuff and eventually sold out and became a chromium skin.

I'd jump back to opera in an instant if they had all the features of the old versions, but with a modern html and JavaScript engine.

that would be ~12.14. 12.17 build was after crucial devs departure and is full of critical bugs (constant crashing due to linking broken openssl, 64bit build unusable, etc).

Perhaps the user doesn't want his/her web browsing experience to be the awful, bloated, slow, tracking-laden experience that javascript has made it into for the rest of us.

I for one applaud this individual.

He's using Opera 10. The one with a built in IRC client, mail client, bittorrent client, Web server, widget system, and loads more. He's using, by far, the most bloated and slow browser ever created. He's not choosing a lighter experience, he's choosing a slower and more broken one (as evidenced by the fact that it can't even load one of the most popular websites in the world correctly).

It had all those things, and you can call that bloat if you wish, but at the time it was decently fast.

http://lifehacker.com/5352195/browser-speed-tests-chrome-40-... for example, or https://ktetch.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/benchmarking-browser...

Get back to us when you can load 100 (one hundred) tabs in under 2.5GB of ram and maintain snappy experience on 7 year old 2core/3GHz computer.

Some users will always cling to older tech. Some users like the simpler interfaces. Some hate UI design changes (like Australis in Firefox). I don't understand it myself. Especially when a user makes a decision to put themselves at risk security-wise as this user is by using an unmaintained browser that isn't tracking security issues any longer.

If they didn't change the user-facing parts and just fixed the security issues, I think a lot more users would upgrade.

What's the actual risk though? I have a feeling these users are also the more experienced and cautious ones, the ones with JS off by default, the ones who aren't going to be as easily tricked by social engineering, and that already removes 99% of the attack area.

Someone finds a zero day html parser vulnerability and takes over your computer by putting the malicious markup in a banner ad.

More experienced users are not safer in any way if they're using unpatched and unsupported software.

An example of a vulnerability of an even older version of Opera for Windows, that let an attacker totally own the client computer: https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-13...

"Large values in the HTTP Content-Length header can cause Opera to crash. Certain specific values can cause a memory corruption, which in some cases can allow arbitrary code to be injected and executed. In most cases Opera will just crash. To inject code, additional techniques will have to be employed."

More details in the pages linked to the URL I provided.

And overflows in the image handlers which crop up every now and then. Anyone that thinks they are secure using an outdated and insecure browser by disabling JavaScript doesn't understand security's complexities when dealing with something like a browser.

My dad hates upgrading software because they mess with the UI and remove features he likes. He is not security conscious and is subject to attack.

The vendors take shortcuts, and force UX on usera because they don't want to bother back porting security fixes or making security code separable from UX feature code

This has to be the best kind of user complaint. I amreallycurious if anybody from Google actually answers and I am dying to see how they explain this kind of "flaw" to their loyal user

Oh, that is bad news. I've noticed they've removed the link a few weeks ago, but the old URL was still working... I was hoping that they would have let that page. :(

Sad to see that this functionnality is removed without any official replacement.

I'll miss the ability to search easily through a lot of comments. I guess I will have to ask the name of the song a lot more often now.

The most pressing question i have after reading the OP and all the comments here is not answered:

Why would anyone ever have the urgency to read comments on YouTube?

That page was terrible to try and read, the comment obscured most of the page as I scrolled.

Learnt a new word: "extraload"

Please disconntect Youtube (comments) from Google+. I don't want to read sub-threads of "friends-of-friends" of people I don't know. I want discussion on topic (video). Youtube is not Facebook. Youtube had a good comment section, before the Google+ - that no one wanted anyway. Anyway, G+ is pretty niche nowadays. And YouTube is going strong, so please make the comment section more relevant again.

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