Hacker News Reader

As best as I can tell, there's no way to find your previous comments, OR to tell if you've received a reply.

It's a commenting system without the pretty standard minimum feature set pretty much every other commenting system has.

> OR to tell if you've received a reply.

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.

That may be the goal, but when you're trying to convince people to join your social network, this is the sort of thing that stops them.

I know Youtube Comments are generally the worst - but when some content creator says "Hey, leave a comment below if you have questions" - and you do leave a comment, then you've got no way of knowing whether they've replied.

It seems like they may as well just remove commenting, at that point.

Except this does much less to curtail flamewars (what would not be able to find one's own old reply do for that?) than it does to curtail exchange of thoughts and growth. Also, you do get notifications for replies, though not a great overview of them. For flaming, that's fine and more than enough. It's just useless for actually discussing anything.

If you wanted to contain flame wars, wouldn't the very first step be not to prioritize controversial comments in the ranking algorithm? (as mentioned above in this thread)

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.

About comment history, it seems that it existed but got removed (why, I have no idea EDIT: kevin_thibedeau makes a good point on that topic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcH9VR96Z1M

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.

another thing is that on youtube the videos often get removed because copyright owners complain/object - if that happens then all the comments also get removed. Why should one bother to comment if the comment just gets deleted like this?

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

> As best as I can tell, there's no way to find your previous comments, OR to tell if you've received a reply.

Yeah. Compared to a forum written in, say, 1995, it's kind of a joke.

The comment algorithm itself is also broken. Comments that get many replies and are controversial are shown higher than those that purely get many up votes.

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.

hmm has anyone tried such global karma that determines default comment ranking? IMHO it could work only if its on something like a logarithmic scale.

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.

I also just find that a lot of the implementation of the comments is horrible.

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.

Proper threading and down votes introduces self regulating mechanism. It won't increase the quality on poor videos, but will help distil usefulness in niche videos.

Edit: Youtube would never do that, because reading comments distracts from watching videos which reduces ad revenue.

I don't know if you remember, but youtube used to be ordered by time of commenting and it was terrible: so many videos had 'FRIST!!1!' comments (yes, multiple of them)

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…

very good point re blowup. Another thing is that whatever reddit is doing, still doesn't help much to clean up comments on large lightly-moderated subs. Best quality is still a matter of having an army of moderators and tight rules there, like r/science and r/askhistorians (?is that the one? its called something like that anyhow) subs.

Just like with any old primitive forum.

> mass of low effort comments

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.

I like this idea, wonder how it scales! on the simple side of things, you can have something like that youtube snob browser extension, that simply hides stuff like all caps, no punctuation etc. Guess you can add more such hand-crafted features..

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?