Hacker News Reader

Yep, it's frustrating. Youtube comments really are hopelessly broken.

Re-shares are not good reading. They are written by users for their followers, not for the people on the actual video page. As you said, they have zero value.

When I first noticed this way back when Google started publishing re-share comments under the videos, I would reply to those comments with remarks such as "I already knew that; yes I know what the video is; why are you repeating the video name"... and some people responded with "what are you talking about" because they didn't even know their re-share comments were being published on the video page. That's how broken the comments are.

To be fair, it's not like YouTube comments were ever working well.

They were never great but they were better before.

If by "before" you mean 2008, then yes, arguably. Starting around 2009 I've started using various browser extensions to hide the comments, and I've never been happier.

I don't understand. Can't you just... not read them?

That kind of software is easier to install, but less consistent.

No. To sift through the comments you want to read, you need to at least read a few words/sentences of even the unwanted ones - that wastes time and makes us slow.

Hilarious. I recall saying to myself YouTube won over Google video because they supported comments early on. They really understand social. Laughing at myself...

As I noted at the time, fixing a roiling cesspit by draining it into the freshwater supply is hardly a solution.

YT comments should have been hauled out and shot. Not jackboot-forced onto other platforms as well.

Yeah, there was a project comparing YT comments with Metafilter comments at one point: http://comments.thatsaspicymeatball.com/

Looks like the latest comments are from Feb 2015, sad that it's not still live.

Not a terrible quality snapshot though.

Metafilter's highly underappreciated.

Sometimes I think that's a good thing.

There are two types of YouTube comments. There are comments from random people on very popular videos. Those are often an excuse for people to say something with a big audience, and those comments have usually been of low quality. The other type of comment is when there's a small community around some particular niche subject or particular content creator. And there the quality of the comments can actually be pretty decent, because it's not just drive-by comments from random folks. Unfortunately, YouTube's comments changes have generally targeted marginal improvements on the quality of the first kind of comments to the detriment of the second kind.

I highly recommend using Alien Tube [0]. It fetches reddit comments for the video, it's really well done. If it finds nothing, it displays the orignal YouTube comments.

[0] https://alientube.co/

Wow, it's like glimpsing the alternate universe where sidewiki worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki

Disaggregate content from commentary. That's the internet I want.

> Then finally there're all of those G+ reshares

Facebook has the same problem. Any reasonably popular feed, such as I f'ing love science has completely worthless comments, because 99% are them just people tagging their friends.

Google+ is really its own thing, and very valuable as such, but Google keeps trying to make it into something it's not.

You see Google+ interaction where you expect simple comments. I often see Youtube comments in Google+ threads because the thread happened to start with a video, and therefore automatically becomes a Youtube comment for barely literate Youtubers to spit their bile at. Or I see a G+er accidentally post a Youtube comment as a nonsensical G+ post.

Google tries to treat everything the same, but they need to recognize that different things are different things. I don't want my G+ stuff on Youtube, and I don't want Youtube stuff on G+. You don't want G+ reshares in the article's comment section.

I'm glad they finally seem to be coming to their senses. Would have been nice if that'd happened a few years earlier.

To be fair, to take the YouTube comment section, which in the days before G+ was known as the second greatest online cesspool after 4chan, and actually make it worse is an achievement of epic proportions.

> People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username.

To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.

Maybe that's part of the reason I can never figure out what's going on when I follow someone's link to a conversation on Twitter.

This is the bane of my existence when it comes to Twitter.

Why are you even allowed to have 2 names anyway? The real one(the one in your url,.e.g. twitter.com/<realacctname>) and that $WHATEVER_STRING_YOU_WANT username?

Idea, someone make an extension/greasemonkey that replaces all the free-form usernames with the actual account name so I can follow conversations without having to deal with all the mental bookkeeping of 2 names per user in conversational thread.

Some of the reader apps will let you choose which one gets displayed, or displayed most prominently.

Twitter, I'll never understand... I have a theory you need the brain to be wired differently.

Meh, twitter makes sense to me when you understand two things:

1) It's fully public, and everything you're a fan of uses it.

This makes it fantastic for building a feed of stuff you follow in tiny, tidy, bite-sized messages where one overactive wall-of-text can't slow you down as you drink from the firehose of info.

2) It came out of SMS. That means it keeps the limits of SMS, like short messages and usernames and whatnot. Imho they should break out of this box a bit - move tags and people out of the message body and swap names into the UI.

Something twitter is doing right is the ability to expand the convo right there in the timeline. I'll give them that.

The reply thing really gets me - reddit and HN threads are really easy to follow. Why is that so hard to do?

Both Facebook and YouTube comments support threaded replies, but people tend not to use them. Either just a UI issue (the reply button is not highlighted) or a deeper structural issue (people know that top-level comments won't be reordered, so they think the conversation will still be readable) or a prestige issue (both YouTube and Facebook collapse all replies to top-level comments by default, making it MUCH less likely that your comment will be read as a reply.

I think FB is different since it's a much smaller set of people and the replies go from the oldest down to the newest.

There also tend to be fewer comments (it's easy to see who is replying to who) so threading is typically not necessary on FB.

Threaded replies are a somewhat recent addition in both cases. In the case of Facebook, it's only been available for a couple months, and with YouTube, maybe a year or two. People are probably just used to the old way.

FB's threaded replies also only go 1 deep.

As do YouTube's IIRC. See Jeff Atwood of StackExchange on his thoughts re: threading.

My thought is that HTML needs a comments primitive with date, author, subject, and references, with the resulting view (threaded, flat, collapsed, etc.) a client detail.

Or, you know, Usenet, tin.

I still miss usenet. It's a shame that we still haven't improved on comment systems despite decades of technological advancement.

I've spent a fair bit of time reflecting on it. I don't think it would work if resurrected:

1. Usenet was small. Somewhere between 50k and 500k users, based on my own and Gene Spafford's guestimates. More solid numbers appreciated (~1988-1992 or so).

2. It was selective. You had to be a student at a research university, or work for a tech company, or have government access, or be able to gain access to systems provided by same. Which meant you were at the tail end of a highly selective filter.

3. It crumbled under the face of multiple attacks: spam, abuse, trolls, etc. There were some defenses, but ultimately insufficient.

4. It was a pain to administrer, and for little or no gain. Which meant that few providers would, those who did charged, and they recouped minimum benefit for the effort. Ultimately it fell prey to the problem of shrinking usage and ready substitutes largely via mailing lists (relatively comparable) and Web-based forums.

5. Limited rich-format support, limited permanent content support, limited collaborative effort support. A Usenet-type functionality with _some_ support for post formatting, for images, video, and audio (but not to the point of being readily abusable), and for permanent content (FAQs, Wikis, etc.) to be usefully co-related to the primary discussion, would be useful.

I don't know that we'll ever have "one" conversation platform again. And no, Facebook doesn't count.

Point 2 was only true before 1993. After that, everybody could get on usenet. And did. The eternal september drove the quality down quite a bit.

The Eternal September changed things. As participation increased, experience worsened.

"Classical Usenet" was what came before, for the most part.

I find them really hard to follow. Threaded commenting isn't so fun when you can't collapse a single comment's thread. Instead, if I want to know who is being replied to, I need to place my finger on the screen and scroll up, seeing on who's comment it lands. That tells me which comment the current one is replying to.

4chan (well, imagboards in general) have a nice system where you can reply to multiple people at once by referring to the post id. Top-level comments are usually represented by referring to no comment, or by referring to the OP's post id. I find this much, much easier to follow.

This plugin will solve the collapsing thing for you on HN:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...

I agree that having some sort of easy way to quick-view the parent of a post would also be useful.

Re: Youtube comments - http://www.theonion.com/article/local-idiot-to-post-comment-...

You forgot to mention how the comment system bubbles up the most controversial and divisive comments, giving them the spotlight while productive conversations get lost in the noise.

Yes it's silly and annoying.

Tumblr has very much the same program regarding reshares. Although I'm not sure if Tumblr even wants to foster discussion on their site--people do it any way, of course, quoting each other, but most Tumblr themes make these kind of discussions look awkward and hard to follow. Nested quotes get thinner and thinner, until you have just one word per line, sticking halfway out the container.

Since google knows everything, they could easily hide comments from people that speak a different "dialect" than you do. For example, they could show only comments from people that also frequently visit HN.

Or rank them more highly

They also lack translate button.