Personally I don't think YT comments, for all their vulgarity and chaos, required any "solution". They were cesspools, but ultimately cesspools of humanity. There is absolutely no reason one couldn't ignore them if they found them so distressing.
if they were so desperate to give it value why not just make it display based on some algorithm (top comments or some hacker news-ish setup). they approached it in a completely uninspired way. Violating everyones privacy is not some dream solution. it seems more like "Plan D"....
I have to say I've been amused at the people exploiting the combo of "no character limit" and "collapse button at the end of the post" by tacking public domain novels on the end of innocent-seeming posts.
This one in particular confused me. I get that it's a common pattern, but I thought Google had UX people these days.
Did you notice that if you get a notification about a video, and then click the notification to watch it, the video continues to play in that dinky little notifications feed taking up like 1/5th of the screen at most?
Did you notice that if you change your layout to single-column, the column is the exact same width as each column was in the two-column layout?
I use G+ for one community. I regularly can't find that community from the main page and have to type its name in the search box.
I can't talk about the new Gmail interface because I swore that off a long time ago.