Vi Hart: cramming G+ into YouTube has made comments even worse, I'm leaving
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
Told you so :(
Though I'm personally in a slightly different position, where my online handle is my public face that my hard earned reputation is linked to, but google wants me to use the birth-certificate name that nobody has heard of >:( (And it's not easy to just lie about my real name since I once bought something with google wallet, so they've seen my credit card and they want my profile name to be in sync with that...)
The frightening thing is that most of these people probably are not consciously trying to be jerks -- they simply do not realize that their behavior counts as "being a jerk". Thus, it's trivial to see why having to use their real name does not matter much if at all.
At least with pro username websites, you can opt into real names. I feel like this is the optimum approach, and that all others are subversive to a completely free conversation, which is what the internet first championed.
If say I am watching a clip on guns, and then I make a comment on the clip, against or for, people will realize I watch clips on guns which I'd rather not share.
Honestly, the chilling effect worries me. I appreciate that a lot of people would rather just not deal with the like of Stormfront, and simply pretend to themselves that people like that do not exist, and that those views are not held, but this is a harmful way of dealing with anti-social views.
Even if we argue that a real-name policy would totally kill off all hateful comments, we have to consider if this is even a good thing; hateful comments should be met with rational arguments that undermine them, and show them to be incorrect. If someone says "all [people of some class] are evil", then one solution is to shame them into shutting up by linking their comment to their real name, but this just allows them to continue to think this way without ever hearing a dissenting opinion (I mean, they're hardly likely to bring this up in public, are they?).
The internet has a wonderful power to throw people of contrasting views together, and get them to show each other how they think, and allow them to change their minds. The mere fact that this process may sometimes result in offense isn't a good enough reason to stop it. If someone's views offend you, then it is your duty to prove them wrong and -- if you cannot do so -- consider that your own views might be incorrect.
I know I've personally debated with others online and learned from the experience, and I also know that I'd never have done so were it the case that I would have had my real name linked to the views I was espousing. It strikes me as incredibly harmful for society in general to attempt to silence offensive speech, not only because it means that those who hold offensive opinions can never be proven wrong, but also because it means that unpopular, yet true, opinions have no platform to be proven right.
5 out of 7 times I've tried to create a Google accounts over the last years I was asked for a mobile number (that an SMS was to be sent to) before I could register. Given that a huge chunk of android users synchronizes their address books with google my mobile number is effectively as good as my ID.
Unfortunately those 3 times I actually needed the account I was trying to create all required my phone number, so they are all tied to my real name (and address and birthday, etc.).
No fake G+ profile required, and each G+ Page identity is actually tied to its own auto-generated Gmail account, not the host Gmail account.
So they actually actively support your use case, its presence has just been drowned out in the commentary.
1. You mix pseudonym and anonymous (your other post says "They do officially support anonymity").
2. The Real Name™ BS is still binding for the main G+ account. I have to tell Google my name, then they are kind enough to allow me to enrich their knowledge about me with all the online handles I use...
That _might_ be enough for the use case the GP described, it very much isn't 'anonymous', not 'pseudonymous' if you tell name and handle to the biggest ad company on this planet and still a real name policy that is utterly broken and stupid.
(Minor G+ rant follows)
People like me are seeing the technical proficiency of the G+ system every day. If my GMail tab (for whatever reasons) logs me out I can log in again - just to be sent to my 'suspended profile'. Note that I was looking at GMail moments ago and certainly would like to see Gmail again.
Instead of G+ I get this:
Your profile is currently suspended
Until your profile is unsuspended, you will be unable to use this feature.
Visit your profile to learn more.
As for the rant, random brokenness/inadequate customer support is hardly a trait limited to G+, it extends to all their products.
There may also be enough people who consider perfectly non-jerk behavior (by some subjective standard X) to be jerky (by subjective standard Y).
It's a surprisingly subtle thing, to be a jerk. No matter how good you are, everyone is not going to like you. No matter how bad you are, someone is going to like you anyway. This is a truth that politicians are intimately familiar with, since their careers depend on maintaining awareness of how they are perceived by large groups of people. This is also well understood in Silicon Valley, where some of the most successful entrepreneurs are clearly and openly jerks - but who are revered anyway.
Complicating matters is that the standards of jerkiness change. It used to be that cussing made you a jerk. No longer true. There is a strong cadre of egoists constantly looking to eliminate the association between "selfishness" and "jerkiness" - with surprisingly effective results.
Last but not least, the public likes to witness the degradation of others. Most reality TV and daytime talk is based on this premise. It makes us feel superior, a kind of milder version of the mob mentality. (And they get what they want because people are willing to have almost anything done to them in exchange for attention, including being demeaned.)
Most YouTubers who make original content, like Vi Hart, are not doing it for attention. They aren't willing to participate in pop culture sado-masochism. What Google has unwittingly done is force this unhealthy dynamic on content creators.
The solution, of course, is to give content creators more control over their comments, over the community of people that consume their work. That is entirely possible from a technical point of view and I think would address this problem to everyone's satisfaction.
If you're being a jerk too much, maybe you ought to re-evaluate your personality, and make a bigger effort to empathize with and respect your fellow man. I don't think much of anyone here disputes that.
But I would also say that never being a jerk is just as big of a problem. If nobody has ever thought that you were being a jerk, maybe you need to learn to respect yourself and stand up for yourself more often, or else people will tend to not take you seriously or respect your opinions.
a) The user has arbitrary bad orthography because the user believes "her writing looks cool".
b) The comment represents ignorance towards something that it's pretty easy to search, or the user has shown negligence/laziness towards researching.
[1] Jerry Springer, host of a TV show with people acting badly on it and essentially becoming 'famous' has made acting badly more acceptable to way too many people.
Working in the fly-over (and quite cold this time of year) part of the states in a position that puts me in contact with quite literally thousands of them every quarter, I call BS on this one. I wouldn't say that most people see tech folks as that. I would say that most people in the farmy part of the country don't really have an opinion about the tech industry, and those that do see tech people as generally useless, or just disconnected from the lives of the rest of us.
They believe that there is a lot of money being thrown around, and that some of the technology coming from the coasts will be useful in their lives, or will be convenient for talking to people, but for the most part they're indifferent.
It has very little to do with religion or wealth, and more to do with lifestyle (city v country) and focus (work v family).
And I will grant you it is difficult to pull statistics from the people who choose to comment on web sites. So it would more accurate to say 'of that group of people who comment on web sites' various themes pop up regularly with regard to stories of tech billionaires, festivals like Burning Man, and current trends in technology.
But now you've got me curious so its off to run a couple of surveys...
More info here including the weird things that triggered the auto flagging of profiles, and what shut down accounts couldn't do:
http://infotrope.net/2011/08/04/google-plus-names-policy-exp...
From the link above:
If you change your profile name, the following things seem to trigger the automatic flagging system:
Mononymity, i.e. having only one name (and having just a dot, or similar, in the “last name” field).
“Unusual characters”
Actually unusual characters, like a heart symbol (❤).
Punctuation marks, including quotation marks, parentheses, and possibly even hyphens and apostrophes.
Unusual capitalisation (including capitals appearing within a name, as in McWhatever)
Spaces in either part of your name, for instance “Marie Claire” as a first name.
Name using more than one character set, such as a name which uses the Latin character set for their first name and the Chinese character set for their last name.
Certain words, possibly including profanity, names of famous figures or deities, etc.
Professional titles such as Dr., Prof., etc.
Suffixes such as III or Jr.
This is beyond bizarre because there are all kinds of names with those attributes, especially "unusual characters," (hyphens and apostrophes, periods) spacing, many first names, many last names, letters, "profanity," deities.
There were reports of people who have "two first names" as legal name (example Ron Paul, and the fictional Gwen Stacy) being suspended without warning as a violation of the real name policy.
They seem to have relaxed that policy some. They got a lot of backlash because of the policy and especially their strict policing of it and blanket suspension without warning of "offenders."
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271?hl=en
Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. It's recommended that you go by your first and last name because it will help you connect with people you know and help them find you.
It won't stop the most persistent people who are out to hurt someone, but it will stop others.
Then YouTube channels or public fora could have a "No pseudonyms" options that requires a commenter to use their real + name if they want.
For that reason, I only use G+ for super-anodyne stuff, gmail and androidery. And it's just a huge hassle to keep logging in and out, and very easy to forget until the comment is committed...
It seems like this could be expanded to be a general-purpose pseudonym system without too much trouble. Everybody who has a YouTube account who wanted to keep their YouTube name already has a pseudonymous Page, so the groundwork has been laid. Pages work a lot like normal Google Plus users, and seem to have a pretty thick layer of separation.
Also, Google has added a "nickname" spot in the Google Plus account, so John Smith could have his nickname of "Johnny B" and his pseudonymous pages WeirdSecretKink66 and RantingPoliticalIdentity23.
The biggest problem I see with using Pages for this is
(1) the UI sucks. The name even sucks for this context. Users don't realize this feature exists and even if they have it it's tricky to switch to a Page identity for leaving G+ comments.
(2) it's not supported across the whole Google ecosystem - you can't leave Play Store comments with a pseudonym.
(3) There's no way to ban Pages from your Plus threads. I should be able to say Real Names Only if I choose.
(4) There's no full-out "Anonymous Coward" zero-login approach. Obviously there's good reasons to avoid that feature, but if they want Plus comment-threads to be a truly general-purpose social layer for things like Blogger and YouTube and the Plus circles, then the people running the thread need to have the option to enable fully-anonymous comments in their own space.
Also I have a hard time believing the switch to real names has even mostly to do with improving discussion. It seems more like a concerted monetization strategy through fine grained tracking and marketing.
It's a personal policy of mine that I never use Facebook or Google to sign into a site and use that site's "local" authentication. I use keepass to store my passwords so they're all unique anyway.
If a site doesn't offer their own authentication I usually bounce, unless it's really, really compelling (and off the top of my head I don't recall any that have met this bar).
Accounts with odd names might still get flagged by the "does this look like a real name?" filter, but at least according to policy you should be able to submit an appeal if you can show other cases where the name is used online.
Also, I'm not sure what's happening in your case, but I personally have a G+ account and Wallet account under two very different names. If you're still experiencing this, Shish2k, please send me an email with some screenshots. This would seem to go against the "established online identity" policy, and I'd like to ask the G+ team about it.
http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...
I mean, the title is a good title for her blog, but as it does not mention Vi Hart (and why would it, it's her blog), it makes a very nondescriptive title for a HN submission.
If the original content is good, but has a "non-upvote-able" title, then the only way for that kind of news to reach HN frontpage is if a third party re-blogs about them with a better title.
As happened in this case.
I understand the existing policy as it is used to prevent editorializing, but it's unfortunate that this burying of interesting/original content can also result.
The way the system is now encourages the creation of almost empty blog posts basically just linking to the actual interesting news just to attract more clicks. It does not promote the interesting news to the top of the page, which is the purpose of the system. Editorializing will occur be it here or outside, in said blog posts.
At the end of the day what matters is that it's really hard to judge a article based on just one line of text and past experience with the source; using this judgement to rank with high influence is an error. The implementation here is well balanced, but not perfect.
As suggestions I would like to leave these:
Greater importance to upvotes, especially on new stories;
Make votes reflect toward the user's karma, encouraging active participation on the ranking;
Evaluate votes relatively, both for stories' ranking and users' karma, taking into account if the user votes a lot, how critical he is of articles, how his votes correlate with the reading interests of the rest of the population(but be careful not to drive away different opinions), etc.;
Measure time between interactions with HN to know how much time was likely spent on the article;
Make better use of the workforce reading the "new" page by showing them personalized pages with what they haven't seen yet
Yes.
And it's a well-known property of the policy.
"Google+ YouTube Integration: Kind of Like Twilight, Except In This Version When +Cullen Drinks BellaTube’s Blood They Both Become Mortal, But +Cullen Is Still An Abusive Creep, Also It Is Still Bad"
I know HN doesn't want us to continue to discuss this issue in threads that are not directly related to talking about HN's title policy. However, there will be literally no stopping this discussion from popping up again and again because it is an actual problem for readers of the site and it will take every new reader of the site being told why things are broken in this way before they stop asking about it in unrelated threads. I find it interesting that Paul continues to hold to his position that it's an acceptable problem to have when there is a constant stream of readers signaling it is a real problem with the site. This post is one very clear example of exactly why it's a real problem.
I can see at least two ways to address it without spending more money on moderators. 1. Allow volunteer moderation and trust those moderators like Stack Overflow does. This is a solution that has been proved workable time and time again. 2. Give users a way to add some additional context to posts. Author name being included in the title is the bare minimum needed but I can think of a few other helpful pieces of contextual information as well.
This would be useful.
Wait, what's this in the sample code?
article = ReadabilityParser.parse("http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html")
Google is very good at sorting the web and finding the interesting content. I think in the long run they might be able to do the same thing with comments and be able to extract the insightful content and weed out all the noise. If they manage to do that it could be a revolution: imagine a website like reddit where you could automatically hide all low-content submissions and comments based on your preferences.
They're definitely not there though, so far this G+/Youtube integration is an unmitigated disaster. It even broke my Chrome plugin that removed all comments from Youtube videos. Life is suffering.
That's how I use YouTube, and I couldn't be happier. I was hiding comments on YouTube before anyway.
Google+ was never intended to be a product in itself. Google+ is Google's social layer. Providing social features to other Google products was always the plan for Google+.
That said, it's obviously got a lot of warts, like promoting Plus power-users over the regular subscribers. Say what you want about Reddit, but at least the infamous karma-farmers get a lot of legitimate upvotes before they bubble to the top and don't pop in their^H^H^H^H^Hthere automatically on the strength of their reputations.
This "popping-in" reminds me of Digg somehow.
September 2011: "Until now, every single Google property acted like a separate company. Due to the way we grew, through various acquisitions and the fierce independence of each division within Google, each product sort of veered off in its own direction. That was dizzying. But Google+ is Google itself. We’re extending it across all that we do—search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube—so that each of those services contributes to our understanding of who you are." http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_google_horowitz/2/
October 2011: "The strategy is revealed in the name," Gundotra agreed. "We chose the smallest modifier we could. Just a plus." But the shift it represents is not small. Plus is now a social layer built into all Google's Web products." http://readwrite.com/2011/10/19/sergey_brin_vic_gundotra_on_...
March 2012: “This is just the next version of Google,” Mr. Gundotra said, noting that he sees Google Plus as a social blanket that envelopes the entire Google experience. “Everything is being upgraded. We already have users. We’re now upgrading them to what we consider Google 2.0.” http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/google-defending-go...
Doesn't get any clearer than that. People just assumed it was spin at the time so focused on the FB-aspect of it. Instead turns out they actually meant every word, and things are finally on track as far as they're concerned.
The only cure if you disagree with the vision is to stop using Google products altogether.
This is a common sentiment, but doesn't simple platform pragmatism make it obvious why they want to merge disparate identities and systems? Why should YouTube have an island comment system given that it's a Google property? Of course the replacement should be ready for prime time (it sounds like some basic features are missing right now, such as channel owner moderation), but the eventual move to that is something that under virtually any situation anyone would recommend.
My Flickr account got turned into a Yahoo account. My Skype account is now a Live account or whatever. Of course these things come together, and I'm not quite sure why every narrative about things like this (not necessary your post) has to be "G+ needs to take on Facebook so this is how it's doing it", when the more obvious explanation of "Company homogenizes systems" fits so well.
Further one annoying aspect of this whole drama is that to demonstrate that there is a problem, people become the problem. It seems like the vast majority of abuse in YouTube land right now are people desperately trying to demonstrate that the Google+ migration was a mistake (e.g. copy pasting tanks an other inanities). This demonstrates that people resist change more than any fault in the new platform.
They could have merged Youtube and Google video early on but never did. They only gave an option to link your google and youtube accounts if memory serves. There's no link to youtube on the Google Search home page the way it has links to gmail and other services. It's always been an island so far so the fact that Google seems to have rushed a G+ integration into youtube says something IMO.
They did, but not early on. It caused some drama when they announced Google Video was slated for decommission and all videos migrated to YouTube.
(as you say, there's no compelling reason for them not to)
Right question: Why did they release it in the current state, which is, I think it's fair to say, 1) a disaster and 2) technically rubbish for all the reasons in the OP.
You should be asking: Why, when building a cross-site system to leave comments, are their clever engineers ignoring the established discipline of spam protection, which they know how to use, and building a system optimized for social peer ranking, sharing cat videos and trolling?
But either way, it makes the Real Names Only thing more obviously false: you're making a general-purpose reusable platform and not a specific social network of your own. It's a "Social Layer", right?
In that case, forcing the users to adhere to a real-names policy instead of providing an official supported path for anonymity or pseudonymity sticks out as trying to push your users into a pattern that they might not find a natural fit for them. And by "users" I don't mean the commenters, I mean the pages to which the comments are attached - if I want to allow anonymous/pseudonymous comments attached to my channel or page or whatever I have a Plus thread associated with, why doesn't Google support this?
Even made a video explaining how to do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKBGsu0TxnY
Really the underlying problem here is that "Google+, the unified platform/identity system" has the same name as "Google+, the social network which lives at plus.google.com". People just blank out anything they do/say due to the assumptions which arise from conflating the two.
Anonymity means no-one knows who you are, not "no-one except Google."
I want a firewall that separates identities. The identity that I use to connect with my mom and in-laws should be separate from the one I use to post on tech forums. The identity where I share baby pics with my wife's friends should be separate from the identity where I comment on deathmetal videos. If Google requires them to be the same - I'd rather delete some of those identities and stay anonymous/logged-out, not merge them.
Some of us belong to minorities that are actively discriminated against, legally and illegally. If services start forcing us to use our real names for discussion, we are opening ourselves up to potentially dangerous situations, all in the name of allowing Google to monetize us better. Wow, sounds like a great deal.
They even made an easy to follow help video to walk people through it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKBGsu0TxnY
There's actually no problem with the system on this front. The real issue is Google's haphazard communication.
That's a very Google-centric way of looking at it. From their point of view, merging everything may be a big convenience and make them more money through more detailed profiling of users.
But my end user point of view is the opposite. The fact that one company with a product I use bought another company with an unrelated product I use, because it happens to create efficiencies on a balance sheet, doesn't magically create a desire within me to use those products together.
I don't need some stupid cat video I clicked on and watched for 10 seconds affecting my searches and ads I see. My choice of what videos to watch is by default disjoint from my other online activities. If I want to share a video, I'll do it explicitly and don't need any integration to make that happen. Having my actions tracked across unrelated sites and reported to everyone I know, and a labyrinthine scheme of privacy settings I would need to constantly monitor to stay configured the way I want, just keeps me off social networks altogether and using adblock/ghostery everywhere.
It's a very every company ever way of looking at it -- if you have multiple systems that do largely the same thing, you take the better or more encompassing of the two (or three, etc) and let it win. This is 90% of the purpose of companies acquiring systems and companies.
As to tracking, do you think Google didn't already track you with complete accuracy and knowledge? I don't think this does anything at all to improve their profiling of you. Literally nothing. They probably have some hopes about engagement, but I would wager the primary motivation is simply rationalizing systems.
And let's be clear -- YouTube's comments before this debacle were a garbage dump of noise. They represented the most notorious, least signal manifestation of comments on the tubes. Now, apparently, distaste for Google+ is enough for people to black that out of their memory?
There's much made of how Apple isn't the Apple it used to be. What about Google? A guy I know through music commented that getting hired at Google was "a breeze." That contrasts with the being interviewed every which way I used to hear about.
I've always taken pleasure in pointing out that 4chan doesn't have the worst comments, and that title belongs to YouTube.
I'm glad the world agrees.
Youtube, on the other hand, is simply plagued by stupid comments.
Vi mentioning torrents made me wonder: would combining torrents with something like flattr and a reasonably good ui plus maybe a choice of where to host comments (reddit etc.) be something that I should be working on?
Since torrents eliminate the hosting overhead, there is no real extra cost that content providers would have to pay here. Probably the only question is whether people would support something like that through flattr, but it seems to me like patreon[1] is doing pretty well already. And the model to keep content at a "release early to paying members, then to the public" makes a lot of sense in general. The only real problem I can see is that YouTube does have the benefit of being very accessible - automatically converting videos for mobile devices etc..
[0] https://github.com/daviddeutsch/yt-sanegrid/ [1] http://www.patreon.com/
Not absolutely true. (Though a lot can be done with incentivizing the user base to make it mostly true.)
Giving up accessibility and mobile seems like the touch of death.
Streaming though... It obviously depends on the userbase, but I have downloaded feature length videos faster through bittorrent than youtube took buffering the first minute.
Another idea - maybe a middle ground would be pre-leeching episodes. I will want to watch them eventually, so might as well download ahead of time. Best of both worlds. Actually... that's exactly the kind of thing that would kill a centralized service like youtube, but would make a torrent-based service fly.
The better solution, if you don't agree with their new comment policy, would be to migrate to another video site like Vimeo.
That's why I mentioned flattr and patreon.
There are a number of reasons why that might have been in that particular case, but still, an interesting data point.
The other day I watched a infrequently viewed video on how to install carpet on stairs, uploaded by a professional carpet installer (and not some profit generating wikihow crap). I consider this one of YouTube's most powerful features... it's a trove of self help videos for almost everything.
I am subscribed to a number of channels, mainly edu/pop science stuff. I took note to scroll through the comment sections during the change and from what I saw the quality generally improved. I was also pleasantly surprised to see better discourse under some of the more popular entertainment videos although in the first couple of days there was the occasional protest comment. It’s the gaming videos that attract the largest amount of trolling and ASCII art comments.
Ironically those protesting the comments are the ones producing the spam, seemingly just to prove a point. The main complaints: lack of character limit, users can reply to their own comments, and the order of the comments. This isn't unfixable, they'll have to study the new comment corpus and tweak accordingly, there is no one size solution to trolls/spam, just data. And I hope Vi takes that into consideration. The new comment system might need a short while to mature, the fact that it wasn't perfect out of the gate doesn't mean it's a bad concept.
I remember similar amount of displeasure on display when YouTube changed the rating system from 5 stars to thumbs up/down, and there was always the smaller retaliations following each redesign (youtubers hated the new unified channel design at first and produced the mandatory protest videos) there is also residual anger because YouTube nixed video responses late last month due to low usage.
It’s mainly aversion to change, this time the change is bigger and is noticeable not just to those that make the videos.
Google becoming a waste land? Maybe. But that's only if you conveniently forget that Youtube was a radioactive sewer filled with all sort of mutated, barely functional animals and plants. I'd rather have silence than that.
Youtube needed the open comments for the sale (comments drive views), but Google doesn't need sheer numbers, it needs quality. Higher quality comments, higher quality content, much higher possibility of monetizing. Google is moving in the right direction.
I thought the point of these features was "think of the children" (and letting kids access comments that aren't moderated is a big no-no in online safety), but clearly there are use cases that aren't being captured here.
On YouTube, the only channels I read comments on are the educational ones (Crash Course, Grey Explains, SciShow, etc.). For everything else, I don't care much for hearing what other people think. So in my use case, I honestly haven't seen much profanity or bad comments in my entire time using YouTube.
For Google, I use strict Safe Search because I don't care for NSFW content. I also work at a school and when I need to search for images to use on handouts, I don't want any NSFW content to appear.
> Then wouldn't it make more sense to complain that Safety Mode should filter "bad" comments rather than all comments entirely than to complain that you want Safety Mode and Safe Search to be in different states?
No, because prior to Google forcing my G+ account to merge with my legacy YouTube account, I was able to have these in different states. YouTube had Safety Mode off and Google had Safe Search on. If Google is going to force people to merge accounts, then they should not be removing functionality that existed when the accounts were separate. Complaining for a feature to change, when it was working perfectly fine on its own before, is far less productive than pointing out how two features worked separately before they were merged together. This also ties in with what theOnliest says below. There is a very distinct different between the two use cases (reading YouTube comments and using Google Search). It does not make sense to merge the two features; especially if you aren't going to rename then into a single feature (there is no indication on YouTube and Google Preferences that changing one will affect the other).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDTspUNj-4w&feature=c4-overvi...
He quite clearly enumerates the reasons why he believes this change hurts him and other content producers.
Seriously?
Spam, trolls, racists, and flamers were routinely "thumbed up" in comments. And then we have the comments consisting entirely of "exact quote from the video you just watched" which typically have hundreds of thumbs up as well, and add absolutely nothing to any discussion on the video itself. I don't think I'm alone in saying the SNR of Youtube comments was low to the point that I never sought out to read them any more. And when I did, it was more of a "lets see how bad the train-wreck is" mentality.
Moreover, did Google/Youtube said they pushed the change due to quality of comments ?
Stupid comments = good stuff? :)
The second are videos from my friends, or select channels I subscribe to. These usually have a small viewer base (<10000 views), and in the comments one can actually have a useful discussion.
Of course now many of these small feeds say 'Comments are disabled for this video'. I assume it's because the channel owner does not want to link their google+ account, or some technical fuckup - it seems unlikely they'd all change their settings, but I guess it's possible.
Not that Usenet didn't (and still does) have its problems, but I feel you're right about the quality of the discourse in some of my old favorites. However, I've personally always attributed that to the higher barrier of entry than the medium itself. See: "the September that never ended".
I frequently use the https://youtube.com/tv layout after seeing it on my Samsung Smart TV
Original content: http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...
Well, boingboing is festooned with ads and affiliate links. It's a business, after all.
The problem is not so much whether BB is blogspam[0] but that blogspam often has a better chance of getting up-voted on HN.
[0]: My view: There are many ads, but half the time there's some sensible additional commentary for the target post, so there's plausible value in exchange for the ads.
But when caught out they tend (to the extent I've seen) to either say nothing or to just delete the post, rather than make an effort to correct mistakes.
(On a related note, I'm amazed at the level of snark and bile in the some of the comments on Boing-boing; the nasty ones rival or out-do the worst of Youtube.)
I repeat, I have no plans to stop uploading to YouTube. I like @doctorow but that article's title was sensationalist and quite incorrect.
Youtube has lots of problems, but it has lots of amazingly wonderful aspects as well. It is rapidly becoming a very important part of the way people communicate in the 21st century. Yet google is so ham fisted in their handling of youtube they have no idea what to do with it other than use it as a lever to compete against facebook. Google should be coddling the creators on youtube, these are people who have acquired very enthusiastic and very large fanbases through the medium of youtube. Some folks make their living entirely off of youtube. Others use youtube as a critical part of their brand and their business. Many musicians have kickstarted their careers through youtube, for example.
Google should be understanding the way these people use youtube, and improving the tools they have available to make their lives easier. To help them connect even better with their audiences and fan bases. Instead google treats content creators little better than any other average user of youtube.
Google didn't switch the youtube comment system to g+ for any benevolent reasons, those were just excuses and justifications for them to try to roll out the g+ empire far enough for it to actually get traction.
Meanwhile they are pissing off the people who add the greatest value to youtube. The trolls and spammers don't give a shit. Even in the worst case scenario for them where they are completely and utterly silenced it's not a big deal, they'll just find some other outlet. Meanwhile everyone else pays the price.
The saddest part is that google doesn't even realize the value of what they have, and because they are so inept at monetizing anything other than slapping ads on it they may never realize until they've destroyed it or driven everyone elsewhere.
HN Discussion to the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069
"I repeat, I have no plans to stop uploading to YouTube. I like @doctorow but that article's title was sensationalist and quite incorrect."
Shouldn't someone be able to come up with a half decent competitor at this point in the game? Seems like Google is trying really hard to kill the best media property they've got.
You can make the argument that you can utilize "the internet" as a channel - but I think it's been demonstrated that people prefer to have a slice that they know is going to be specifically video-based content.
But seriously, the FSF or somebody needs to work on the problems Youtube and Facebook solve, but urgently. When posting things on your own website and sharing it with your friends becomes as easy as updating your facebook status, much disruption will ensue.
It just doesn't seem like it should be that hard. A fancy UI on top of email and an easy homepage creator is all it would take, right? Opt-in advertising could give people a choice whether to display ads or pay for hosting.
Couldn't web hosting companies make a lot of money and compete with Facebook and Google if they innovated this way? Because, basically, that's what Facebook is selling. Hosting+fancy UI. I must be missing something because nobody seems to be doing this.
At that point we can do FB but have it decentralised, you won't need a sharing service you'll just need to give people your IP - this I felt was the idea behind Opera's Unite "server in a browser".
You could use a little Pogoplug-style appliance, but you're still placing usability at the mercy of Comcast, clueless users, and curious cable-pulling children.
EDIT: Mmh. Humor on the internet?!
Guess at least you can have moderators.
Sounds like Reddit need to add a video distribution system, it would be quite a thing to pick top vloggers and add them in to the current mix.
I wonder where Vi Hart stands WRT her content. Can she remove it from YouTube. Could she remove it via a copyright infringement claim?
Doesn't want to comment under your real name for whatever reason (trolling, personal info, fear of being stalked, etc)? Don't comment. Everyone will be better off.
Google, understandably, wants to increase metrics related to time spent on site since it facilitates selling ads. This has led from suggestions having less emphasis on presenting related videos. Instead, priority is given to videos algorithmically determined to most likely be clicked on by the viewer. This has resulted in the suggestion list becoming increasingly obnoxious even for viewers without youtube accounts.
For instance, if I pull up the Dead Skeletons - Dead Mantra music video [1] -- my new favorite psychedelic rock song -- the first four video suggestions are:
I. Weird trick for baldness (ad)
II. Dead Skeletons Mix (playlist of 49 videos)
III. Magical Healing Aura - Om Mani Padme Hum (featured video) [new age esque instrumental with 8 million views]
IV. MOST SHOCKING DEATHS ON CAMERA!!!!!!!!!!!!.flv [presumably a Faces of Death style video for those that enjoy watching people die; absolutely not something I want to expose myself to]
The deaths on camera video only recently infected the suggestion list for this video. Apparently it's the highest ranking result of some algorithm predicting what I'll most likely click on independent of the video I landed on. My only guess at explaining this suggestion is I recently followed some youtube and wikipedia links on reddit about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Edgar Allen Poe's death.
This obnoxious suggestion that I can't opt out of has made me pay more attention to the top suggestions on the videos I watch. Ultimately I'm served up with suggestions that increasingly remind me how Google is tracking my past behavior even though I don't currently use a youtube or gmail account. This has left me longing for the good old days of youtube where I would often follow related video links and discover great new content.
The result of these changes in video recommendation strategy is gradually conditioning me to expect personalized linkbait instead of related content, leading to less time spent on site.
It's a damn shame that Google is so focused on maximizing ad sales at the expense of content exploration functionality. The immediate value and historical importance of the content hosted on YouTube needs a better steward than Google. Thank god Wikipedia hasn't fallen into the hands of a for-profit entity. I can imagine Google getting their hands on the current Wikipedia functionality and gradually jailing users in a Panopticon of filter bubbles optimized for ad targeting -- Orwell spinning in his grave.
Hopefully I'll be able to look back on the previous paragraph in the future and see it proved to be FUD...
[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsyrOGRxF0E
Edit: I may be wrong about the MOST SHOCKING DEATHS ON VIDEO!!!!!!!!!.flv suggestion being targeted specifically at me. However, "The Stupidest Bid on The Price is Right" further down the suggestion list almost certainly is.
It's certainly plausible that viewers of the linked video do enjoy watching shocking deaths on camera (for the record, I have a G+ account and am logged into youtube and also see the same video as the 3rd related video).
Without persistent tracking information I'm not sure how you could make this better. On aggregate, people who watch a music video by the Dead Skeletons tend to enjoy also watching shocking deaths on camera.
My guess at a solution is for Google to do more tracking. They obviously don't understand that you don't watch or appreciate watching people die, so why show it?
Edit: If, while you're logged in, you could "X" out videos you don't watch in the suggested video list that could be a great signal to Google that you don't want to watch such content.
As you (mcphilip) said you don't have a YouTube account, so presumably Google has less data on what you might like or dislike. Suggesting more relevant results to you means that Google needs more data about what you like individually. It's balancing that whole "tracking me is evil" vs "showing me stuff I actually want to see is good".
I stay logged into my G+/YouTube account and the suggestions I get are generally acceptable, sometimes even great. I've never found them outright obnoxious in my case.
There are often videos with misleading thumbnails and descriptions (link baits), with millions of views which have been disliked by 99% of viewers, and yet are in the top suggestions list. This clearly indicates that the algorithm is optimising for maximum clicks rather than optimising for a satisfactory viewing experience.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-ratings-pr...
It's unbelievable that Youtube hasn't implemented this themselves yet.
The "like bar" works fine on your site, however, it still doesn't work for the suggested videos that come up after watching a video. Guess there's nothing that you can do about it though. Still a great site, thanks!
You're right, unfortunately I can't override the contents of what's inside the player itself.
The funny thing is that Google's original success was based on creating a search engine which didn't try to "trap" users to the site, instead giving what they wanted quickly.
die young enough a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
The sign of a good search engine is one where the user leaves quickly because the user finds the content they want quickly.
The sign of a good video sharing site is one where the user stays because the user keeps finding videos they want to watch.
So, in fact, I would find it perfectly acceptable if Google does measure YouTube's performance (and product quality) by a metric related to time spent on site.
You'd have to do some heavy upfront work approving comments and adding approved users, but I believe it would ultimately pay off more than piggybacking on another free service to de-spam comments. Instead, it would be sort of a throwback to the old BBS days when sysops of some boards would call you to verify your account before adding you as a user.
And clearly Google is going to address the nonsense comments somehow, since so many high-profile users are complaining now and threatening to leave. I'm genuinely curious how this will all play out; it may be a good test as to whether management and devs at Google still have "chops".
I hate this argument, because the argument has never been that no person would be rude under their name, it's that there would be less rudeness:
I think axiomatically we can assume that real-name policies won't make people more rude (except maybe on the topic of real-name policies). Here by rude I mean the stupidity of the sort you basically only find in online comments.
So we can then say that there just as many (or less) people being rude on the same site with real-name policies as a site without. I feel less incentive to be rude when my name is next to the comment. I use YouTube. Therefore there is less rudeness thanks to this policy.
For every website I use that has a real-name policy, it has been effective in reducing the amount of rudeness by 1 person's worth.
I would really hope for some scientific studies on how much awfulness we could avoid by people owning up to what they say.
I disagree. For myself personally, I have always believed that real name comment policies will do nothing to reduce rudeness or trolling. The primary reason is that the visibility of rudeness and trolls is what counts, not the raw number of trolls. Even if there are less actual people being rude as often, as long as those trolling kinds of comments surface it has the same net effect and doesn't change anything.
The counter-argument to this is that real names policies oppress the very people that were enabled by pseudonyms on the internet: women (especially in tech), minorities, and whistleblowers, because they're at risk of being ostracized in real life based on their online comments if their real names are associated with said comments.
That said, I think the Real Names argument here is a red herring -- hundreds of employees at Facebook and Google have rehashed this argument over and over again to death. The real uproar here is the change in the "social contract" between users and YouTube; similar to people being upset about ads being added to Twitter or about developer APIs being shut down or when a free service goes to a paid model.
Are you one of those people who used to post rude comments on YouTube? No? Then nobody fucking cares about you.
This reminds me of Facebook's changes in ~2010: They changed the entire layout of the site twice in the same year and there was noticeable backlash, but everyone quickly got over it and (more importantly) usage kept going up. At this point YouTube accounts for 18% of US traffic[1]... I don't think there's a substitute premium video service that has the infrastructure to support that level of usage.
[1] http://allthingsd.com/20131111/netflix-youtube-half-your-bro...
There is plenty of content I'd subscribe to see on YouTube.
If there is, it's something we should promote. If there isn't, we should build it.
A note to Google: when users are looking to get away from your otherwise incredibly successful services, it might indicate there's a very serious problem that should be corrected immediately. People want alternatives to Search, Mail, and now YouTube based on your policies and how you mistreat and ignore users. Perhaps something needs to change before this evil spreads to everything Google owns.
> the users of the site are actually the customers
Well which is it? Do you want it to be free, or do you want to be treated like a customer? Because you don't store and serve millions of videos on sunshine, it takes data centers and lots of bandwidth.
Free to use, free content by default, with premiums and ratings/comments to help people decide what's worth paying for.
There are a number of shows I watch on YT that I find very entertaining. If the latest 3-5 episodes, posted daily are available to a channel subscriber for something like $2.99 a month, and episodes older than that are free, you can either watch things for free or get access to them as they're made and be more involved with the author via comments, etc. There are more options than "free" or "paid" or "advertisement supported." Unfortunately we're still stuck in a world that's riding the coattails of the cable industry, which is now dying, so perhaps that's a bad model to emulate.
G+ has a filter problem. Robert Scoble's been on them about this from the start. Clay Shirkey has also observed (in the general case) that it's not a data overload, but filter underload. Human information handling capacity is limited and we can only process so much.
My preferred mode of using G+ is through Notifications and Search. Both need much love, but they're vastly better than Streams and Communities.
All of which I've written on at length on G+.
A feature does not have to create a better experience for viewers with IQ above room temperature, in order to increase ad revenue.
I'd actually forgot they existed after installing a plugin to have them removed a couple of years back. When I did notice comments, I can't remember an instance where a comment added value to the video.
They always just seemed to oscillate between the "yeah, awesome!" variety or quickly devolving to name calling and borderline hate speech.
I think I'll leave the plugin enabled and not bother with it at all.
Can someone link to an instance of this? I checked out three or four of her videos and the top comments all seem non-hateful, non-trollish.
I just cannot imagine staying on the front page for any more than 3 seconds.
EDIT: turns out that she was considering hosting commentary on her own site, but has no plans to take her videos off YouTube, and criticized BB for a misleading headline: https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576
I don't care for the integration of G+ in YouTube either, but a) there was no shortage of hateful BS in YouTube comments prior to this (as well as some outstanding humor) and b) you can disable comments and even ratings for any video that you upload and/or make them private (eg for fans or even paying subscribers).
Please don't feed the trolls.
Where am I being an ignorant YouTube user? Just seems like a big to do about nothing.
This is the issue.
Many people are also linking to spam, pornography, and viruses. G+'s algorithm also bubbles these to the top because they get a large amount of responses.
(please ignore this retarded comment, faaaagots)
Because I have a young child who is now getting into watching animal shows and children's cartoons on Youtube, I've had to enable the safety feature, which hides all comments behind a link. It's a pain, but it's the only way to avoid her seeing some appalling crap at the bottom of a perfectly innocent video. I'm sure she'll see it all when she's a teen, but I'd prefer her not to see it at age 8.
That's the price of social media, I suppose; you have to take the good with the bad.
This whole movement to control YouTube comments reeks more of management's personal embarrassment that their customers weren't as serious and high class as they. Again, grow up. Not everyone is like you - not even your customers.
What would a good comment sorting algorithm even look like for Youtube? Something like HN/Reddit votes would be worth a try but I wouldn't be surprised to see the trolls float to the top there either.