That comment is right, you can now watch the video while reading comments, seems like a useful change.
Before the mega-angry were posting such comments, and youtube was absorbing it as some sort of great heat sync.
Now, the comments are gone, and the angry crazys will return to the streets, the villages, and this anger will flow into violence, war, nuclear annihilation.
I do.
I really only use YouTube for specific stuff these days. Mainly tutorials from people in the sports/activities I am active in - rock climbing, hockey, hiking, rucking, mountain biking and snowboarding. I also really only use it for product reviews for stuff like backpacks, snowboards, technology reviews, etc.
I read the comments while I'm watching the videos to see what other people are saying about say, a certain pack I'm interested in. Most of the people commenting have either bought or have had said product and their two cents (good or bad) is generally reliable. Its not people sucking up to the creators, its just more opinions I can use to determine if this product or service is worth it. I do this frequently with hi-fi equipment since there are some really good YT reviewers out there for beginners just getting into hi-fi. Or like myself, getting back into it.
If nothing else, the comments give me a more well rounded view of whatever it is I'm looking at.
If all you see is shitty comments, I'm afraid that says a lot about what you watch.
Taking one example, 3Blue1Brown's Deep Learning series, episode 6. Here are the top few comments [0]:
> I'm a university lecturer with a PhD in AI, and I cannot compete with the quality of this work. Videos like this put the entire higher education system to shame. Fantastic!
This is a nice comment, but doesn't contribute anything to my day. I'm sure the creator is glad to see it and I'm glad someone said it, but I don't need to read it.
> Are you kidding me? ONE WEEK FOR 2 MASTERPIECES?!
> Thank you so much!
Same story.
> I've got to say - "Attention Is All You Need" is an incredible title for a research paper.
And now we're down to the reddit comments.
> As a graduating PhD student working in Natural Language Processing, I still found that video to be extremely beneficial. Awesome!
Nice.
> 3b1b is the only content producer whose videos I start by first making coffee, then upvoting, then hitting the play button.
Nice.
> Attention existed before the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need".
> The main contribution was that attention was... all you needed for sequence processing (you didn't need recurrence). Self-attention specifically was novel though.
Finally a comment that contributed something. Not much, mind you (the video doesn't actually claim otherwise), but something.
Unfortunately, that's it. I kept scrolling for a while longer through pages and pages of thank-yous. And that's typically my experience with comments on thoughtful videos. It's not usually like the HN comments where you can actually get a lot of value from the comments alone, they're just... shallow. Sometimes nice shallow, but still shallow.
Because after Youtube themselves made the most corpo-speak video which became the most downvoted video in history[1], they removed their downvote feature.
Now you need to be able to read the comments of each video to see whenever someone releases a scam or has made a major error or correction in their video.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Rewind_2018:_Everyone_...
While, instinctively, the previews below the video feel odd because they've been to the right for so long. Logically, I can see the improvement they are going for here and would welcome it.
And maybe I'm being an anti-change curmudgeon but the previews below seem to be putting more emphasis into engagement chasing social media by having Google try to convince users to click one more video. It's more distracting from the video you're watching than having it to the side in a widescreen monitor.