After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube
support.google.com
support.google.com
I really dislike how stuff like twitter and Instagram have become the standard form of reaching anyone, as I have neither and your messages can very easily become ignored due to the very nature of how these two social networks operate.
Exactly. Pictures visible through normal use are not the same as an inbox you have to go out of your way to read.
At the very least, the sensibe thing is to make messages opt-in or whitelist only. Removing the feature to prevent harassment seems like a scapegoat. I wonder if this was being utilized as an illegal communications channel and YT\alphabet is worried about legal exposure
I don't get where this sense of entitlement comes from. Why do you think you have any right to contact creators or that they shouldn't ignore your messages?
I've used these messages quite a bit to contact people with similar "niche" interests (restoring old electronic equipment from WWII era through the 60s) and it's very useful.
An example I found not long ago is with Google Photos. If you create an album, you can offer to share that album with other people, through their Google account, their phone number, their email, etc. If they accept the invitation, it notifies you and their little circle darkens. If not, it stays light, and still stays in your list of people you've shared with. There's no way to actually remove these unused invites, and these people just stick around as "ghosts" forever. The only way to clean this mess up, according to Google, is to turn off all sharing of your album, and then re-share with everyone you want to share it with, so they all have to re-accept the share invitation (and you have to manually enter in every email address, phone number, etc. again). There's no way to just remove one of these "ghosts", even though you'd think this is a very basic admin task. There's forums where people have complained about this for years, and there is a Google person on there who just complains about people using the forum for complaining like this instead of filing an "official" feature request (which as we all know never goes anywhere), even though this Google person could very well do this herself instead of complaining about all the complaints.
It doesn't help that the Google+ profile they forced on me _also_ has a YouTube account, and I've uploaded some videos to the wrong one, so I get to do the dance twice.
Clicking on "Youtube Studio (beta)" will show me some videos with checkboxes, and let me do some editing, I think, which is probably the thing I'm usually looking for.
It would be really useful to be able to go into a user's profile and filter out the videos you've already watched, or filter them at all.
It would also be nice to have a proper category list.
This is obvious functionality, that they must've left out on purpose. But why?
"TIL Today I Learned"
But later some of them disable it as the only got a flood of messages through it.
I wish the culture of SaaS development would move away from this try-to-do-everything mentality that always leads to anciliary features being modified or removed, and instead focus on honing their core offering. No user cheers a feature going away -- either they're ambivalent about it or annoyed for having to switch away.
Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment. Then they can offer an optional! integration with their other messenger apps which would allow them to compete with facebook.
A proper investment in a social sharing feature centred around your friends on YouTube would be a great idea. Not only for watching together with friends but for sharing it privately (just look at how popular video is on Snapchat). They even have a stories feature already - but for YouTubers to talk to fans!
Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it.
While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders.
I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment.
[0] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did...
Perhaps I was doing something wrong (I don't think so), perhaps it's because I use Firefox and this was a gentle nudge to get me to try in Chrome, or perhaps it's just another one of Google's infuriating and perplexing 'quirks'.
News at 11 : they most certainly don't, as can be ascertained by the gigantic random walk their product update strategy has been in the last few years.
Observing them from the outside, I sometimes even come to doubt their grand master business plan (I'm assuming they have one of those, which is also a doubtful proposition) is to make money.
The problem is moderation. Youtube has enough on their hands dealing with trolls, conspiracy crap, spam, Nazis/other hate speech, propaganda, pedophiles, animal/child abusers, terrorists, copyright, ... - they don't really have the resources to deal with the inevitable sausagefests in the inboxes of women and the other hate that this feature would be used if it were more widely known.
Their obscure social networks (g+, Reader, ...) are/were niche enough to not attract too many abusers of all kind.
2) Google knows the identity of almost any internet user, as shown by the new recaptcha system.
3) They don't allow banned people to recreate new accounts. At least that seems to be a problem for people who were banned from the app store.
If they link this up, they should be able to keep inboxes clean. And if this fails, they just have to offer an option to switch to a whitelist approach for people whose inbox is flooded.
Is is cherished? There is literally a meme that "orange envelope = who did I piss off now?". And granted there is a little bit of worthwhile content on Reddit, but it's basically the equivalent of reading Facebook at this point in time. Especially in what used to be the default subs.
300 envelopes = oh shit.
I'm guessing it is an under-used feature and causing more harm overall than good. I'm assuming they expect folks to communicate on video comments if they want to talk about the video in question.
Are they trying to make it harder to weaponize nasty content?
Or do they just want to save a few bucks by stopping maintenance on a feature?
It would be a shame to see collaboration between channels drop as that, in my opinion, is one of the best parts of the medium.
But no, I suppose just killing the feature with no meaningful replacement strategy is the new GOOGLE WAY™. I can’t wait to invest all my money in a library of Stadia games that will surely last forever. /s
Too risky. They are probably going to deprecate those for another chat product in 6 months.