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Comment by skeaker | Hacker News Reader

Video replies was a crazy idea in retrospect. Being able to anchor arbitrary videos to any other video at will is insanely ripe for abuse. If the feature existed today you would surely see thousands of spam videos with no relevance to the content they're replying to stuck underneath anything remotely popular. It's a wonder it ever worked as intended at all.

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I think it could be a neat idea if you allowed the creator to choose which videos are posted as replies. I know there's so many times where a youtuber mentions something like "if I'm wrong/ignorant post me a link", and the ability to point to a video providing a better method would be invaluable.

OFC, I'm assuming a utopic world here. There's no incentive for neither Youtube nor the creator to do this, as opposed to simply linking more of their own stuff or whatever is ad friendly.

I'm curious if there's a good way to extend this to reply videos that refute the main video. If you lock it to the original authors control then if someone e disagrees with them and is fact checking their BS that reply would never get seen.

Maybe an author's hilight section and then an "other replies" that's more open.

> It's a wonder it ever worked as intended at all

Even when it was available I've only ever seen a few cases of it working well. One prominent one was an educational YouTuber (Veritasium) asking users to post video replies with solutions to a physics puzzle/experiment that he was doing. Besides that, the feature was not used by creators and so spam videos and response girls were rampant in the video replies to most popular YouTubers.

Haha, Reply Girls. That brings back memories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl

If memory serves, that was ultimately what got the feature on its way out.

Look at TikTok for how it can be done. It's not perfect but it's used very widely and ties context together across videos.

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