YouTube steadily moves toward the TV station model.
I use a blocker to hide comments and don’t seem to miss much. Let people discuss videos on other sites like twitter or reddit.
Yes, exactly. I've never understood why content-host sites seem to think attaching first-party comment hosting directly to hosted content is a good idea.
Why not just host what you host, and then let aggregator/discussion sites (various subreddits, various private forums, Usenet, Slack/Discord groups, etc.†) link to your thing-that-you host and host comments? You can have RSS feeds to ensure those aggregator sites can—if they want—automatically generate their own link-posts when your site has a new post.
And, best of all (from my perspective, at least), it doesn't force people who are consuming your content for different reasons into the same room where they will inevitably shout over one-another due to competing access needs. Each community can have their own conversation about your content, and can feel morally justified in kicking out uncivil people, since they can just go find a different conversation about the same thing in a different community. Rather than there being one "canonical" conversation that they feel shut out of.
† I exclude Twitter from this list because Twitter has no concept of partitioned subcommunities, and so inevitably, if there's a conversation about something on Twitter, it becomes the "canonical" conversation. That's kind of the point of Twitter, for some use-cases (e.g. celebrities arguing with other celebrities where other celebrities can watch and get pulled in), but it's bad for the use-case of regular people trying to have a regular discussion.
If you evict the community to an outside site, will someone care if the video links starting point to Vimeo or another video hoster instead of YouTube? Probably a bit, but not that much.
Why would YouTube makes changes that make them more into a replaceable part?
I think, if users couldn't see (or maybe just couldn't retweet) one-another's DMs to a checkmark'ed-account (or to any account that was "made for the purpose of feedback"—maybe we could have a separate icon for that?) it'd fix a lot of Twitter's current problems.
But really, if content creators want to get "feedback", they just need a thing that's essentially like email—a separate private channel between them and each audience-member—but where you can easily forward a whole email thread, after the fact, to the content host, and it'll appear below the content in an FAQs section. Sort of like how reviews work in some digital storefronts.
I ask because I feel like you're describing the same sort of system I am in my sibling reply below:
> But really, if content creators want to get "feedback", they just need a thing that's essentially like email—a separate private channel between them and each audience-member—but where you can easily forward a whole email thread, after the fact, to the content host, and it'll appear below the content in an FAQs section. Sort of like how reviews work in some digital storefronts.
If all such comments were submitted knowing they'd just be treated as "private feedback" by default, with the moderator having the option to promote such feedback to appearing as a public "comment" [which, yes, isn't that different from "comments with pre-moderation", except for different expectations on commentors' parts], do you think that (valuable!) thread still could have happened?
Cramming everything into one flat thread has already been done in phpbb and works for small threads but big threads get into issues when you are not interested in every part of the discussion but only some.
1. the creator has their own private forum (e.g. a Discord group);
2. you, as a potenial commenter, can easily join said group as a guest, with your YouTube credentials used to identify you in the group;
3. or you can also just post "into" the group without joining it, using the form below the video;
4. the community itself can be deputized to moderate such comments;
5. the community can have all sorts of thought-provoking discussions in response to such comments, visible to one-another in the (private) group;
6. the content-creator would have an easy interface to "highlight" any given thread/subtree of conversation from the group, making it into a visible comment thread appearing below the video.
Essentially, this proposal would just take each YouTube channel, and make its comments section into a private forum under the content-creator's control; and then, separately, make the "comments section" below the video into a sort of moderated "best of" version of that forum's discussion of the given post.
YouTube isn't a content host (in Google's opinion AFAIK). It is "Social media". So more comparable to Facebook removing comments.
Also, imagine being a small creator that makes youtube videos. Are people really going to go find your subreddit to post comments on the video? That sounds inefficient and serves really no purpose.