I was never bothered to register, hence I assume reducing friction might increase my spend on educainment.
What I really want though, is proper commenting system under videos.
I'm curious to know what you mean by that?
As far as youtube comments being the butt-end of jokes about bad comments, I think this is just due to the fact that video is the great common denominator (and thus, the intellectual filter is very very low). Reddit's r/videos is limited to "non-political" videos for much the same reasons (and given that r/politicalvideos is... well, let's say the comment quality is not consistent.
I don't really see how this can be improved: a voting system won't filter low-effort/common denominator comments if what the majority wants is low effort comments.
Or just if the mass of low effort comments is too large. And since low effort is easy to make, the mass will be large.
CGPGrey on what kind of ideas/memes spread faster: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry
H3h3 on the insane number of views on 'minecraft sex' videos (which is exactly the kind of thing I mean when taking about common denominator): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3LhrbSp6Mw
And then there's the lessons of Twitch Plays Pokemon: they had to remove the ability to request multiple keypresses at once because people kept stalling (start10) for example.
It's a commenting system without the pretty standard minimum feature set pretty much every other commenting system has.
Most likely to contain flame wars. We're dealing with base level humanity on YouTube. You have to enact these sort of constraints to keep things tolerable.
It seems like they may as well just remove commenting, at that point.
Currently, the system rather seems to encourage flame wars then to prevent them. You might not find the comment that you were planning to reply - but you'll always find some comment that you can spray fresh vitriol on.
Finally, as a constraint I find the design odd - it doesn't actually prevent you from doing anything, it just makes an arbitrary set of actions unnecessarily hard.
As for receiving a reply, I know that you get a notification, at least if people use your +name in their comment, but it isn't easy to manage given the lack of history, as you pointed out.
as i see it: Youtube comments are not intended to be something that adds value to the video, it is supposed to be a feedback mechanism for the one who posted the video
Yeah. Compared to a forum written in, say, 1995, it's kind of a joke.
Edit: Youtube would never do that, because reading comments distracts from watching videos which reduces ad revenue.
My guess is that it's just impossible to regulate. Take a website that has state of the art threading, karma system and all that: reddit.
AskReddit threads sometimes get to 10k comments, it's just impossible to read through (the bottom 5k comments will never get read, much less upvoted). And people on Reddit sometimes say that their inbox "blew up" and what not when they get a 100 responses (which is a lot really).
Can you imagine youtube-level traffic? Imagine a video with 1M views (which is really not a crazy number by youtube standards): if 1% of users dislike your comment enough to reply to it, you'll get 10k responses! Even if we cut this number by 10 (assuming that 9/10 users either don't bother reading or replying to your comment), you'd still get 1k comments. Even a tenth of that feels like a large amount.
Now, also imagine people being able to read through your comment history and go on witch-hunts like people on Reddit sometimes do (and which every moderator tries to prevent), but on youtube audience scales. Oh god…
Just like with any old primitive forum.
I'd love to have a personalized filter to hide low effort comments and posts automatically, both on YT and Reddit.
It would be doable using machine learning to assign a low effort/meme score to comments. Posts could be scored by the average time it takes users to see it. If it is a gif, image or clip under 1 minute - it's almost 100% fluff.
For something machine learning, well if it'd need to train on your preferences all the way from character-lvl to your preferences, maybe its too expensive to do it for all users.
On the other hand, if it tries to learn just a smallish matrix of general purpose features for everyone (how exactly? to predict votes? or unsupervised?), embedded in the say JSON-LD of each comment, and then just a simple shallow regression model on your history of voting conditioned on that matrix, maybe that can scale?
Hank green made a video lately about how people should reply with + to a post they like instead of up voting and the top comments on recent videos are now far far better than ever before.
I don't know if YouTube made their algorithm bad on purpose to stir controversy which would stir usage but they really need to fix it.
They could also do things like global karma that makes all your posts naturally higher or lower ranking so that people that constantly troll get buried immediately on every video instead of always enjoying attention on comments before they get down voted.
Else people that tend to create substantial on-point comments will get swamped with say funny or snarky one-liner producers even worse than now, as those are much easier to digest and, being devoid of opinion, much easier to upvote.
For one, that it's somehow and for whatever reason linked together with Google+. Far too often, I have to read through a sea of +-syntax, which makes no sense from the YouTube-side. And when people share a YouTube-video on Google+, apparently the text with what they've shared it, shows up in the YouTube-comments. I don't need to know that jeffmeyers told +sandrasmith, +thomasthomasson and +phillipmuller to watch the video that I just watched. That's not relevant for the discussion about the video.
Then something really basic that you could reasonably expect webpages to have figured out since the early 2000s. Shortening comments properly. I don't need a comment shortened when the part that you've cut off is only 1 line. Not even if it's 5 lines. That's just annoying. But somehow Google has managed to implement the single most naive implementation of comment shortening.
Next thing is the thread-system that they have going on. I still have not figured out how the comments inside a thread are ordered. Most of the time, they seem to be chronologically ordered, but occasionally you see people replying to other people who have commented further down in the chain. That their time stamps are only as precise as the next bigger time-frame ("2 weeks ago", "6 months ago", "1 year ago") doesn't help either.
And then their tagging system. It's a naive "+username"-text in the comment text. If the user changes their user name, then good luck trying to trace it back. Also, they allow user names with spaces in them, meaning that it's often hard to figure out what's part of the user-tag and what's part of the actual comment-text. If they had a less naive tagging system with proper identifiers behind the user names, they could highlight what the user-tag is and dynamically load in the correct user name.