YouTube comments have actually improved a lot over the past couple of years. They have advanced from what was once a morass of non-sequitur racial slurs in vaguely parseable sentences to a predictable pattern of self-amused meme repetition.

Depends on which videos you are watching. YouTube comments are wonderful for the various communities. It's when videos attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of viewers they degrade.

As someone who was making videos, and involved with a YouTube community, they were wonderful. I equate it to Reddit's front page. If you only look at the front page, you aren't actually getting much value from it.

I think that's exactly what the op meant. In other words, changing the appearance of the website won't improve its content and, I agree with him, it definitely should improve.

That's like saying Reddit is a horrible cess pool with no redeeming quality based on the results of the front page alone. If you're only bothering with the videos without 100k+ views, of course it's going to be awful. It's the nature of the internet. However, there are many small communities on YouTube that do very well, and the comments there are just wonderful.

Do not judge a book merely by it's cover.

As usual, XKCD had a great idea for improving Youtube comments.

http://xkcd.com/481/

Try Comment Snob: http://www.chrisfinke.com/2011/03/18/youtube-comment-snob-is...

Also allows filtering of HN.