YouTube Addresses Massive Spam Problem Following Rollout of Google+ Commenting | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Addresses Massive Spam Problem Following Rollout of Google+ Commenting

techcrunch.com

73 pointshepha197964 comments

Ooh ohh I've got an idea. Put things back how they were. YouTube doesn't make sense as a primary Google-branded property. It's users have a different of needs than other Google-branded products do. Hell, YouTube isn't even housed in Mountain View. It's in a different city.

The problem isn't that Google integrated Youtube's comments into a unified social layer. Integrating Youtube comments, Blogger comments, Picasaweb comments, a Facebook-like social network into a single system?

That's a great idea.

The problem is that they screwed the pooch on it in every way I can imagine. They soft-pedaled the rollout which made it into a million tiny pain-points and broken promises instead of one big one.

They completely screwed up their automoderation algorithm. It's a failure. Whatever Youtube used before is obviously better.

They made the system far too opinionated, not giving the page owner any moderation tools or filters or anything - the page owners can't allow/deny pseudonymous accounts (and even the existence of pseudonymous accounts is unclear).

They didn't offer any anonymous approach, and the pseudonymous system is bizarre and unclear.

If you're building a single social tool like Facebook, being opinionated helps. But if you're building a whole social platform that you're bolting onto every form of content your users run? Every video, every blogpost, every picture? You need to let the users have the tools to run their comment-sections.

> That's a great idea.

It's a failed idea. Aggregation protocols (RSS and ATOM) abandoned, Friendfeed died. Because gulping from every source possible without digestion (!) means diarrhea

Are there any good digestion algorithms or content filtering service out there? No. For every new merged info, the only thing increased is noise, not signal.

In separated channels, like Picasa, Blogger, Youtube, you can prioritize them, you can reply blogger comments while ignore youtube trolls, but in a merged timeline, you will have serious management troubles

> It's a failed idea. Aggregation protocols (RSS and ATOM) abandoned, Friendfeed died. Because gulping from every source possible without digestion (!) means diarrhea

RSS failed because it wasn't user-friendly enough for non-geeks. Other tools that let users drink from a firehose of unrelated info like Reddit and Twitter do just fine. Diarrhea or not, they get users.

I agree with everything you've just written.

On an unrelated note, I read "comment-section" as "commentcision" and thought you'd coined up a new phrase to describe how users want their online persona handled.

I don't see that happening anytime soon. Google has invested too much into the Google+ brand to no apply it to one of the biggest properties. To them, having messy Google+ integration is better than not integrating Google+ at all.

Which is the current fundamental problem with Google.

Wishing your crappy social network wasn't crappy doesn't mean I want to use it with YouTube (or at all). Instead of shoving it down my throat, why not make it usable?

can you please explain the ways in which G+ is not usable? while it's got less users than FB, it's afaik generally perceived as far more user friendly, well designed, and feature-ful

> it's got less users than FB.

It's like a cellphone that you cant call anyone with. No one really cares if it's 1000 times easier to use if you can't call your friends.

They took something benign but useless and made it non-consensual. Google+ is now the equivalent of all the cable channels you didn't want but your cable co made you buy anyway.

I was an early adopter of G+ because I didn't like the heavy handed BS from FB. I still begrudgingly use FB because alot of my friends are on it.

I use G+ because none of my friends are there. I'm able to hear from interesting or influential voices of people who choose to blog or share on G+. Since there's little danger of my mom, my pastor, or my boss wishing to be friends with me, I can feel freer to speak my mind as well.

To me, G+ having a niche audience is a feature.

I totally agree. Its like twitter with no character limit. And instead of celebrities and famous people, its intellectuals, academia and influential people in tech that you can follow. People hate on Google+ way too much without even really giving it a fair chance. Its very useful and flexible, it is what you make of it.

To me, G+ having a niche audience is a feature.

That's not a feature, it's a bug that google is trying to fix by shoving g+ down everyone's throat.

I guess one man's bug can be another man's feature.

> It's like a cellphone that you cant call anyone with. No one really cares if it's 1000 times easier to use if you can't call your friends.

And now you know why they're unifying their account system under Google+. Being able to include everyone who has ever had a YouTube or GMail account in their social network means that suddenly, people you know _are_ on Google+.

This is nothing new. This is basically the sequel to the YouTube -> Google Account transition that happened a few years ago, except this time it's in a post Google Reader shutdown world so Google is no longer the darling of Hacker News and Reddit commenters.

completely valid point (which i addressed in my comment), but also completely separate from your initial complaint of "why not make it usable?"?

Because both of them suck. They suck thousand times more when they try to reach outside of their native environment, like third-party Facebook comments or third-party sign up with Facebook/G+. The problem is that both G+ and Facebook try to be the 'ecosystem of the web', and that's wrong and everyone hates that.

Did they sort out the "forcing you to use real names" thing yet? A lot of people have very good reasons for not wanting to expose their real identity to every community Google eats up.

I don't know about the rest of G+, but since the integration, I've been unable to comment on YouTube videos with my G+ account, something that worked fine before. I'd certainly call that "not usable".

I too couldn't leave comments. It took me awhile to figure out it was because I was blocking third party cookies. Apparently the new G+ comments on YouTube rely on them.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of annoyances just off the top of my head:

- The site uses a lot of JavaScript but seems to assume everything will be loaded immediately. I've had days where my connection is slower than usual and the page looks like it's loaded even though it hasn't. The worst part is that the links are some of the last things to load, and the "everything in a tiny box" layout means I can't actually do anything meaningful without clicking a link.

- The site puts everything in tiny boxes and assumes that you want to view everything in that same tiny box. Actually, maybe they've eased up on this lately and I just looked and it doesn't seem as bad as it used to be, but clicking on a YouTube video in my notification feed still plays the video in my notification feed, which is brain-damaged.

- I thought the two-column layout was a ludicrous waste of space (and it confuses me anyway because there's no obvious pageflow), so I switched to the one-column layout. The one-column layout uses the same column width as the two-column layout.

- The sidebar on the left is apparently engineered to be as confusing as possible. It's autohidden even though it could be visible if the overall layout didn't have so much gratuitous blank space. The way you get to it is by hovering over what looks like a dropdown. If you mouse over to what looks like a dropdown and immediately click it before you realize that the UI is lying to you and it's not a dropdown, you'll accidentally go "Home" because that's what appears under your mouse. Even if that space said something else before you moused over it! (FWIW, Facebook isn't too wrapped up in their own cleverness to realize that maybe a sidebar should just be a sidebar)

- I was about to say that the site may be optimized for mobile at the expense of those of us using computers, but the iOS app isn't better. I haven't used it in awhile and have apparently blocked it out of my mind, but it's annoyed me in some way nearly every time I've used it, and in fact I have a notification that I'm not getting rid of right now because it would require me to use the stupid thing. Yeah, I realize they probably put more work into the Android app for obvious reasons, but c'mon (I guess it's better than the YouTube app, which I deleted after discovering that it apparently only wanted to play videos in portrait orientation, upside-down)

- A regular occurrence: "You have X notifications" (click notifications feed) "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work. In fact, no joke, this just happened, just now: Sign into YouTube from being completely signed out. Click notification feed. "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work.

- Speaking of YouTube, someone had the bright idea that there should be no character limit on posts, but that the only collapse link should be at the bottom of the post. "Just enough text to trigger an expand link followed by the full text of a public domain novel" is now the funniest troll I've ever seen.

- I started using my G+ account for real because of one community. It's literally the only thing I'm ever interested in when I visit the site. The first five or six times at least I couldn't figure out a better way to find the community than typing its name into the search bar. Even though I was following it and it was the only thing I was following. After that my desperate ad-hoc fix was to unsubscribe from all the autogenerated "What's Hot" type garbage figuring that at least one post from that community would be in my feed.

- I can't find a "no, I will not spam all my friends, stop interrupting me every time I log in with a full screen splash page to ask me you jerks" button

(FWIW, I used Hangouts recently and I actually liked it. In fact I had to use it all of once to prefer it to Skype. That's the worst part about this G+ fiasco; it's not just that I think G+ is bad, it's that Google's insistence on equating "unified login" with "Facebook knockoff that you will join or else" has singlehandedly caused me to hate the company to a degree that even I wouldn't have expected a year ago. I actually think it's too bad that Google's worked so hard to turn themselves into an anti-brand.)

Suuuure... put it back to the way it was earlier. Youtube comments were great then!

It's not Google-branded.

I liked the comment system on YouTube provided I wasn't looking at random viral videos with 1M+ hits. On a lot of the channels I subscribed to, the discussions were respectful and interesting.

Since the G+ fiasco, I have absolutely no idea what's going on. I get asked who I am by this popup that shows me 6 different choices, mostly duplicates, over and over. The thing is just never done with me - always demanding I jump through some new hoop.

I eventually caved and created a G+ page for my "channel". It is annoying how many times YouTube asked, but the result is quite satisfactory. The sharing settings actually seem pretty reasonable to me: whenever I interact with YouTube, Google is very clear about who will see my content (the "Public" icon from G+ is reused when posting a comment, +1s and upvotes are explicitly mentioned as being public, and so on), and having a "page" for my "channel" lets me not use my real name on YouTube, which I irrationally do not want to do. (jrockway is fine. A two-word Real Name is just too damn formal for trolling YouTube.)

Overall I do not think this is such a terrible thing; as someone who used G+ pretty actively before the comment system merge, I do see a lot of relevant comments on YouTube videos I never would have seen before, and since I would probably be sharing the videos I like to G+ anyway, it doesn't bother me that my comments show up in both places.

It would be interesting to invent a time machine, go back in time, and try doing the merge the other way: fold G+ into YouTube. G+ users probably wouldn't be mad, since they already use YouTube, and YouTube users probably wouldn't be mad, since they wouldn't notice anything changing. But whatever, the current version of the integration is fine with me, once you decipher what "page" and "channel" mean.

Please leave a disclaimer stating that you work for Google, as your GitHub[1] says that you do. Thanks. :)

[1] https://github.com/jrockway

People take those disclaimers way out of context, so I avoid them. (Google my name to see how I learned this the hard way.)

Most long-time readers of HN know where I work, and I target my comments in that direction, rather than to anyone that happens to stumble upon this page. My apologies.

This is a controversial change, and praising the new system while neglecting to mention that you work for Google risks coming off like astroturfing, regardless of your intentions. I think enough people can be reasonable and take your opinions into consideration even if your employer is the topic of conversation.

That's fine. It's good to consider the source of the argument in addition to its content. I take a neutral view because I don't really care one way or the other; if this was jrockway Inc., I might not have done the change in the same way. But perhaps that's why there is no such thing as jrockway Inc., and there is a such thing as G+ and YouTube. Who knows.

Nothing I see on the first couple of pages of Google. A link might be more helpful.

I assume it is this that he is referencing: http://searchengineland.com/google-clarifies-no-ads-shouldnt...

Yup! Makes me look pretty dumb, doesn't it :)

(Also: never go up against the SEO blogs! They have good SEO! :)

I'm not sure avoiding putting a disclosure of interest will avoid that sort of thing. I think when discussing anything related to your employer you need to be really careful.

Opinion should always be disclosed as such with disclosure and probably normally a disclaimer that it your personal view and not that of your company although if it is a statement of pure fact I think it is OK to post anonymously and/or without disclaimer.

Your comment about G+ above is very much opinion.

A factual statement correcting another post "you can now do X by going to Y" in response to a complaint that you can't do X is for me fine even if related to your employer and you don't disclose anything.

Working for myself now means I don't have to worry about contradicting my employer or embarrassing them, it is a nice freedom to have.

Googlers should be banned from HN as they skew many Google-related threads / comments a bit too much.

You're right! This single, reasonable opinion from one of the thousands of informed people who happen to work on a wide variety of products from this particular company threw the discussion way off! I'm glad we have your reasoned opinion to put things in perspective. Now, how about we go burn down Mountain View?

I caved too, but I still don't understand what it is exactly I agreed to, and the system still isn't done with me. I keep getting popups forcing me to choose one thing or another. My eyes just glaze over and I randomly click something just so I can watch a video now.

But I don't want those things to be public or tied to my real name in any way. Or use Google+.

That's completely reasonable. I don't want to use my real name under YouTube either.

My YouTube page is this: http://www.youtube.com/user/jrockway1

Can you figure out that it's related to my G+ profile, https://plus.google.com/115192122236060613729/posts?

For me, it's separated enough, but I can totally understand that not everyone would agree.

The hoops are also confusing (at least to me). It gives you a few options, but doesn't tell you which option you should choose if you want to keep things the way they currently are...

Wasn't the point of the new system to reduce spam and improve comment quality?? I was never a fan of YouTube comments even using a Chrome plugin to hide them for a while, but on some videos I found useful stuff. The little value they had before seems to have disappeared now. The main reason from my point of view is that the comments show someone who has shared the video on Google +. They weren't intending to comment, they were sharing the video and now it's forced into the YouTube comment stream.

No, the point of the new system was to force people to use G+ on youtube.

Strangely enough, while I disapproved of these changes in theory I've found them to be a fairly positive in practice.

I haven't found myself hounded by inane comments because I shared a YT video on G+, just a few extra +1 notifications from strangers. I don't notice any extra spam, but I'm watching stuff with thousands not millions of views. The comments I do see bubbling to the top aren't insightful, but they're generally civil.

Wow, Bob's army actually got their attention. It was becoming scary how prevalent he was, but I still didn't think Google would care. Shows how low my faith in their user support has fallen.

Between Bob's army and insipid comments rising to the top, the comments sections of a lot of interesting, community oriented channels became useless (more so, even, than before). If nobody is actually looking at the comments section, then it doesn't really make technical sense to keep it as it is - it's just busy work for their engineers. So it makes sense then for them to either attempt further fixes, or, in true Google fashion, simply remove the feature altogether.

As a viewer I've already eliminated it by joining their Feather beta.

As a video producer, I'm forced to keep comments enabled so I can keep in touch with my fans.

Thankfully I use two separate Chrome identities.

Remember the 90s? More specifically Windows & Linux? One was completely network oriented but sucked for graphics/sound on the desktop, the other was the complete opposite. Both moved towards each other, but with massive growing pains - some of which still linger today, a few decades later.

Google does ads. FB does social. They're moving towards each other. These G+ problems? Mark my words: Google's Achilles heal for ever.

And broken commenting. I finally gave in and linked it to G+ and now I can't comment at all. Totally, utterly broken. I click on the comment box, a blank pop-up shows up for a second then goes away and I can't type at all.

Same here. Seems to be an "allow 3rd party cookies" thing. Broken as designed, so no more you tube commenting for me.

So you've been able to figure out the cause of this? Is there a site out there that explains the details? (Not that an inability to comment on YouTube is much of a hardship, but it's occasionally frustrating.)

I Googled around and came across a Google support page where someone (probably not a Googler) explained that they had to change their "allow 3rd-party cookies" settings because YouTube and the commenting system was loading shit form everywhere. Possible the everywhere was all Google property, but the idea that I had to turn off a privacy setting in order to comment on YouTube was just dumb.

Others on that page confirmed it. Sorry, I don't have a link. The explanation on the page sounded plausible enough that I said, "OK. Fuck it."

I just checked and this seems to only happen to me on Chrome, but not on Firefox. Firefox shows my G+ avatar; Chrome seems not to know who am for YouTube comments, but knows who I am for YouTube channel stuff. Nice.

Now I have to go see how insecure my Firefox settings are. :)

Ah, I see: yeah, I've got 3rd party cookies disabled in Firefox, so that's presumably my problem. If there were a way to make an exception only for YouTube requesting a Google+ cookie, I'd do it. But I'm not willing to give Google+ a blanket pass on all sites, and it doesn't look like Firefox's cookie controls are fine-grained enough for that. (Maybe I could look for an extension...)

The core problem with Google+ is that people don't want everyone to know what they Google. What goes in the search box is treated as private (even though we know governments can see it, we expect that our neighbours cannot) and now anyone can just skim to our Google+ profile to see everything we've ever done.

I miss the anonymous Internet.

People can see everything you've ever done by skimming your Google+ profile?

I've avidly avoided this stuff in general, how does this work?

No, they can't.

You're right: it was hyperbole. What I was trying to point out is the (sometimes) silent publishing of activities to a social feed some people don't know they have.

Why would you want to be logged in while searching via Google?

Stuff will show up in my Google Now? It's cool to search for a place on my computer and then have my phone ask me if I want directions when I'm leaving.

I am not sure if thats "cool"

I really don't think it fits to try and push YouTube under the Google+ "ecosystem". It's it's own separate community, and many people really want their YouTube identity to be kept separate from their Google/real life one. It asks me if I want to use my real name pretty much every time I open the damn app.

I'll be honest with you guys. Since G+ integration, I've found the comments left on YouTube videos to be far more intelligent and appealing to read.

I haven't been able to leave a comment since the switch (my browser just keeps refreshing).

Wait, is your point and mine related?

Are you using IE6?

No, Chrome. But I do have Ghostery installed. I wonder if it's preventing me from leaving comments. When I click on the comment box and then accept the new tidbits about G+ comments, the page just refreshes.

If they'll give me oldest to newest comment browsing I'll forgive them anything. Well, almost anything.

I'm a big fan of causality and the flow of time.

Why is this a problem? If anything, unrelated commercial spam could only increase the level of discourse in YouTube comments. At least if I see a pitch for a pyramid scheme, it doesn't make me want to kill myself for being in the same species as the poster.

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