Vi Hart: cramming G+ into YouTube has made comments even worse, I'm leaving

http://boingboing.net/2013/11/13/vi-hart-cramming-g-into-yout.html

by wyclif • 13 years ago

315 235 13 years ago

baldfat• 13 years ago

I really have zero idea why I should care? I ignored all comments except when I thought it would be funny. So people come to YouTube to comment??????? I thought that was like only .05% who did?

Where am I being an ignorant YouTube user? Just seems like a big to do about nothing.

Raphmedia• 13 years ago

Her video are very educational and attracted quality comments. Now, those quality comments are hidden, and low quality comments are moved to the top.

This is the issue.

shocks• 13 years ago

boogie2988 disabled comments on all his videos because the hateful spiteful messages (personal attacks re. his weight, etc) all bubbled to the top.

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.

menubar• 13 years ago

Really, I sometimes enjoy reading the stupid comments. Do we really want quality control censorship on comments for all the "I Put Fireworks Down My Pants" videos? I think not.

(please ignore this retarded comment, faaaagots)

blisterpeanuts• 13 years ago

Discussion is sometimes helpful, I've found. It can add depth to the presentation. The uploader or the content creator can answer questions. I think comments can be extremely useful. It's a shame that Google is trying to force the G+ identity merger on Youtube users right now; every few times I use youtube, I have to answer a nagging pop-up with "Ask me later" (no way to disable the feature).

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.

simias2• 13 years ago

I guess Google couldn't resist tapping into one of their only successful social media (Youtube) to promote G+. Of course Youtube being right below 4chan's /b/ in terms of online discussion it was a very risky decision.

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.

skizm• 13 years ago

Search "YouTube feather beta". It removes pretty much everything from YouTube except the video and is an official Google feature. I didn't even notice this g+ thing till reddit and HN started going off about it.

markeganfuller• 13 years ago

That is simply awesome, maybe there's some good left in Google after all.

aroch• 13 years ago

Feather doesn't have the "large" video size, only standard and fullscreen. Which makes it less than ideal

Spittie• 13 years ago

Feater (https://www.youtube.com/feather_beta) + ViewTube (https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011).

That's how I use YouTube, and I couldn't be happier. I was hiding comments on YouTube before anyway.

aniket_ray• 13 years ago

(Youtube) to promote G+

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+.

Pxtl6• 13 years ago

It sounds like Google+ is meant to be Google's answer to Disqus as much as its answer to Facebook. With that in mind, Youtube integration makes perfect sense.

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.

paganel• 13 years ago

I may be wrong and I'm too lazy to search back in time, but as far as I remember they did mean to launch Google+ as a product in itself, at least that was the general vibe (both here on HN, and generally among people commenting on its launch). They made the switch to the "social layer"-thingie a bit later on, after they had probably realized Facebook was too ingrained already to be challenged head-on.

corresation2• 13 years ago

I guess Google couldn't resist tapping into one of their only successful social media (Youtube) to promote G+.

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.

simias2• 13 years ago

It's true but until now it doesn't seem that google have been in much of a hurry to merge Youtube into their platform, at least brand-wise. They've acquired the site in 2006, less than two years after it was created. Go to youtube.com and search for the mention of Google anywhere. Can you find it? I couldn't.

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.

shadowmint• 13 years ago

Wrong question: why shouldn't Google merge systems?

(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?

PeterisP• 13 years ago

The problem with merging identities is that people don't want them to be merged.

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.

antimagic• 13 years ago

Flickr doesn't make me use my real name. Nor does tumblr, nor does Skype. If Google wanted me to merge my YouTube and G+ accounts, and didn't try to force me to use my real name, I would have much less of an issue with it - indeed when other services merged identities, I didn't complain. But merging combined with real name policy is poison as far as I'm concerned.

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.

gdulli• 13 years ago

"Why should YouTube have an island comment system given that it's a Google property?"

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.

stcredzero5• 13 years ago

I guess Google couldn't resist tapping into one of their only successful social media...so far this G+/Youtube integration is an unmitigated disaster.

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.

moot• 13 years ago

Of course Youtube being right below 4chan's /b/ in terms of online discussion it was a very risky decision.

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.

devcpp• 13 years ago

Agreed, there are relatively few idiots on /b/, most posts there just have a special kind of humor. Not for everyone, but certainly enjoyable for the people who can get used to this.

Youtube, on the other hand, is simply plagued by stupid comments.

nollidge• 13 years ago

Local newspaper comments are worse than both of them combined.

merlish• 13 years ago

I hope Google manage to sort this out some time soon. In the short term, just undoing everything and going back to the old comment system might actually be a good idea.

zedpm2• 13 years ago

Check out the beta for "lightweight" Youtube, dubbed Feather[1]. It's a streamlined layout without comments or other junk. I've found that the user experience with Youtube has been steadily declining for several years; this seems to mitigate many of the issues I've had.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

rplnt• 13 years ago

I only miss the bigger-size player in feather. Still using it though.

mnsc• 13 years ago

I miss it too, but maybe it could be added with a userscript?

rohitv2• 13 years ago

Can't you just zoom in to make the video size larger? That's what I usually do :/

Trufa• 13 years ago

I didn't know about that, can't thank you enough!

josteink• 13 years ago

So the fix for youtube breaking perfectly fine comments in a move to push G+ on the unwanting, is to remove comments all together?

Seriously?

fooqux3• 13 years ago

Perfectly fine? Maybe you only watch videos in an extremely narrow group, which typically have only the most eloquent and empathetic commenters, but I think most people would argue that comments have been the worse part of Youtube since their inception.

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.

Nickoladze• 13 years ago

I've had YT comments hidden for years with browser extensions. It's quite good.

zedpm2• 13 years ago

It is for me; if you want to wade in that particular cesspool, that's your choice. I go to Youtube to watch a video and leave.

babysteps• 13 years ago

Noticed that duckduckgo gives you quite a nice stripped down youtube experience.

thinkalone• 13 years ago

Interesting - I opted in and will give it a try.

I frequently use the https://youtube.com/tv layout after seeing it on my Samsung Smart TV

Shish2k• 13 years ago

"The promise [...] was that making people use their real names would incentivize them to behave themselves. It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names. In the meantime, people who have good reason not to post under their own names -- vulnerable people, whistleblowers, others -- are now fully on display to those sociopaths who are only too happy to press the attack with or without anonymity."

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...)

Sharlin• 13 years ago

"It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names."

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.

rtpg2• 13 years ago

There's a large enough class of people that would tone down what they say if they were tagged about what they say ( what if I could link you back to some posts on Stormfront?), or if the person they were wishing to die had a name.

jamesbritt7• 13 years ago

they simply do not realize that their behavior counts as "being a jerk".

There may also be enough people who consider perfectly non-jerk behavior (by some subjective standard X) to be jerky (by subjective standard Y).

Aldo_MX• 13 years ago

To be honest, I do act like a jerk when one of the following conditions are met:

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.

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

No, the frightening thing is the people who are jerks, know it, and don't care. The Jerry Springerization [1] of the audience. Further there is a bit of nerd backlash in the heartland going on. While the readers here might aspire to being the next Zuckerberg, in central part of the US there is a statistically significant part of the population which has this 'over rich, under religious, morally suspect' view of "successful" people in tech.

[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.

rhizome3• 13 years ago

"Jerk" is always defined in a social context, though. In some circles, calling Obama a communist is jerky, in others perfectly acceptable if not obligatory. What is implied in "jerky" YT comments is that the social circles come into contact with each other, but there is no objective "jerky" that comports with the artificial construct of "common sense."

weavie• 13 years ago

What's there to stop people from creating a Google+ account with a fake name?

aestra• 13 years ago

Google (used to) have a controversial strict "real name" policy on G+ and even very aggressively shut down accounts that had "fake looking" names, despite these people having said names. It discriminated against people who had (legal) Mononyms (single name) which is actually common in some cultures. They also didn't allow "unusual characters" in names. They asked for proof of name for shut down accounts and sometimes that proof wasn't good enough for them.

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.

The above is an incomplete list.

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.

glogla• 13 years ago

The Google real name policy (and that breaking TOS is a crime in many jurisdictions), and the policy of requiring phone number on sign-up.

It won't stop the most persistent people who are out to hurt someone, but it will stop others.

Pxtl6• 13 years ago

Really, for the purpose of Play reviews and public comments and other public fora outside of your circles, Plus needs a consistent "Pseudonym-wrapper" interface. That is, a way to create a pseudonym around your Plus account with its own icon. Others can send messages to the pseudonym and can reply to it, but not directly view the owner's real profile and link it back to their account.

Then YouTube channels or public fora could have a "No pseudonyms" options that requires a commenter to use their real + name if they want.

andygates• 13 years ago

I still want pseudonyms within my circles, too. Never understood why I have to be John Smith to everyone who knows me as Johnny B, or Bumface, or WeirdKink66 or RantingPoliticalIdentity23. They're different facets of my social interaction, to different people -- and Google's social graph ought to be able to work that out, too.

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...

shittyanalogy• 13 years ago

Who would have thought that the loud and obnoxious people would continue to be loud and obnoxious? That's craaaazy talk. :)

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.

bentcorner2• 13 years ago

This is exactly what I hate about single sign-on. There's no way to divorce services from each other.

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).

tjohns• 13 years ago

My understanding was that the "real names" policy was replaced a while back with a policy that your account only had to correspond with an "established online identity" and look vaguely name-like. (e.g. no throwaway accounts, no single-word "handles")

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.

orblivion• 13 years ago

Mediagoblin!

rtpg2• 13 years ago

It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names.

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.

rsl7• 13 years ago

But now all those people who don't care about trolling with their real names now know your real name, too. So, win-win?

king_jester• 13 years ago

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 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.

cbhl4• 13 years ago

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:

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.

ksk• 13 years ago

On the other hand, real names have the potential of 'outing' someones gender, ethnicity, etc allowing people to 'google stalk' you and/or be sexist/racist towards you which would not have happened if they didn't know your info.

sesqu3• 13 years ago

I feel less incentive to be rude when my name is next to the comment.

Are you one of those people who used to post rude comments on YouTube? No? Then nobody fucking cares about you.

j2kun2• 13 years ago

The people at Google need to open source the comment data if they can't figure it out themselves. I could take a crack at it and at least I'd get rid of the comments that spout "nigger" a hundred times.

ithkuil• 13 years ago

Your HN post has been quarantined because you used a forbidden word. We are sorry if you were legitimately using it to spawn a meta-discussion about sensitive topics, we are very sensitive about internet censorship issues, but please understand that our natural language parser is optimized for the most common content, and that doesn't include (hopefully) insightful comments like yours.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

That's silly and untrue.

EDIT: Mmh. Humor on the internet?!

chankey_pathak• 13 years ago

NO. Google is trolling. www.gifti.me/i/iPwWl.gif

joemaller1• 13 years ago

Why link BoingBoing and not directly to her actual blog post?

http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...

jawr• 13 years ago

Might be to avoid that very, very bright background.

aaronem• 13 years ago

Why do I suddenly taste lemons?

robotmay• 13 years ago

I'm somehow seeing a blurry yellow line down the middle of the white area, which I think is an illusion caused by the yellow on the sides. It's quite painful to read.

sampo2• 13 years ago

Her actual blog post has been submitted [1], too, but it has a very nondescriptive title "Google+ YouTube Integration" so it had no chance of getting upvoted to HN frontpage.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069

sampo2• 13 years ago

As HN policy is to keep the original titles of the submitted links, this probably has the consequence that only original content that has an "upvote-able" title, can reach HN frontpage.

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.

k3n2• 13 years ago

She must have amended it, or maybe the HN submission was truncated, because the title as it stands now on her blog is:

"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"

travisfischer• 13 years ago

I think it would be helpful if HN allowed an optional inclusion of author name along with title which could be displayed next to the title. The author of an article is more often than not the only additional context needed to make a link title interesting or relevant. You could simply append "by Paul Graham" after the actual title of Paul's posts.

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.

j2kun2• 13 years ago

FWIW I don't think that G+ is a bad system, or even beyond succeeding. I just think the majority of content posted is mindless.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

That's a given. As I've been railing for years on G+, at Web scale, Sturgeon's Law is six sigma compliant: 99.99966% of everything is crap.

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+.

csmuk• 13 years ago

Oddly, I tend to use Bing video search to browse youtube and watch videos now. The experience is better.

talkingstove• 13 years ago

Title is just incorrect: She isn't leaving. She is only "maybe" turning off comments and moving discussion to Reddit.

pbhjpbhj2• 13 years ago

Reddit? No hateful comments there then ...

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?

Pxtl6• 13 years ago

Or Reddit needs to focus on providing a good API and Disqus-like embedding so they can provide Reddit-as-a-service for other websites. Right now sites can throw a skin on a reddit community and wrap it in a domain-name, but it's not really set up for embedding.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

Sub-reddits are like irc channels or usenet newsgroups, they can have owners and be moderated to whatever degree those owners desire. Some sub-reddits are very tightly moderated.

YTerThrowaway• 13 years ago

Before this becomes another Google bashing session, I'd like to point out that this is one person's opinion, a respectable opinion from an intelligent person but still it's very subjective and a mainly a reactive judgment (see the post's date).

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.

jrs99• 13 years ago

people bash google because it's becoming a waste land. There is no aversion to change, in my opinion. There's aversion to bad decisions.

oblio3• 13 years ago

Well, since I've been watching videos on Youtube I noticed something. Pre-aquisition Youtube comments were the most retarded and insensitive things one Earth. I can hardly think of another discussion forum on the Internet with such bad comments. Mostly hateful retarded immature ones. Then Google added upvotes - suddenly there was some sort of filter and the millions (literally) of pages of filth were hidden. Sometimes the top comment was even interesting or funny.

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.

hysan2• 13 years ago

Even if the YouTube comments will be of higher quality in the long run, there is one functionality problem that I am wondering how Google will resolve. That is, enabling Safe Search on your Google Account will turn on Safety Mode by default in YouTube [1]. This in turn will auto-hide comments. This makes for a very poor user experience for those who wish to see comments by default but also keep their Safe Search on - something that was possible prior to the merge.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/174084?hl=en

cbhl4• 13 years ago

I'm curious about your use case. Why would you be okay with YouTube comments (which could be full of profanity and/or the names of reproductive organs) but still want Safe Search enabled?

NathanthePie• 13 years ago

If I may, allow me to point you at a video TotalBiscut recently posted:

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.

yuhong• 13 years ago

Sad the comment by Gthrowaway1 on Vic Gundotra is dead, as I posted on this matter before.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

oh thank god someone said it - YouTube is effectively unusable, it stinks. It's like visiting the X factor shopping mall, with bikinis. (Possibly I have a YouTube bubble I should not admit to but I am assuming that's the default)

I just cannot imagine staying on the front page for any more than 3 seconds.

PilateDeGuerre• 13 years ago

This is blogspam.

Original content: http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...

wyclif• 13 years ago

Actually, the original post was submitted. As was pointed out above, this is not blogspam. It's a result of HN's policy that only original titles can be used. The original blog post has a title that isn't nearly as friendly to upvoting. It's a system that has its pros and cons, but it's what HN has decided to do.

jamesbritt7• 13 years ago

As was pointed out above, this is not blogspam.

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.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

Google's revenue is structured like this: search, peering agreements and whatnot, and way, way down the ledger: "other". Most of the products that google makes are just toys. The pressure is off because nobody at google expects anything in the "other" category to earn company-affecting levels of revenue. As a consequence google has spent years and years being in huge businesses that it barely understands and barely cares about. Youtube being a prime example of that.

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.

herge• 13 years ago

Has anyone used any YouTube competitors? Ms. Hart wants to stream her videos through bittorent, but how much trouble is using vimeo instead?

lambda• 13 years ago

I'm not sure Vimeo is really the right platform. Vimeo seems a lot more targeted towards the art of videography itself, so comments about technique and editing and so on are a lot more common, rather than the actual content of the video.

wrongc0ntinent• 13 years ago

This probably happened because vimeo offered better quality encoding early on.

skore6• 13 years ago

I mostly use YouTube to watch channels that I subscribe to. I already disliked when they switched to their new "feeds" view that makes following channels very tough (sometimes videos are missing, the list only goes so long, but I want to watch something far later, also no real control over what goes into your list in the first place etc.). That made me write my own feed view[0].

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/

stcredzero5• 13 years ago

Since torrents eliminate the hosting overhead

Not absolutely true. (Though a lot can be done with incentivizing the user base to make it mostly true.)

skore6• 13 years ago

There are a good number of channels who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, combined with the hunger for new content... I think you don't even need to do much incentivizing.

MetaCosm• 13 years ago

Accessibility and streaming. I don't always want to download an entire video, sometimes I just want to dip into it and see if I am interested. There are streaming modes for torrents available in some clients that try to prioritize what you need to stream, but they never have worked very well in my experience.

Giving up accessibility and mobile seems like the touch of death.

skore6• 13 years ago

I only watch at home, so clearly I'm not the right person to ask about accessibility.

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.

this_user• 13 years ago

Not having to download a video/piece of music is exactly the problem that YouTube solved. Going back to this doesn't seem like the right answer to me and will likely cost you most of your audience. Furthermore, moving to torrents is hardly a solution for YouTubers who actually monetise their videos through the site.

The better solution, if you don't agree with their new comment policy, would be to migrate to another video site like Vimeo.

ANTSANTS• 13 years ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I prefer to directly download long Youtube videos so I don't have to deal with the site's garbage flash and HTML5 video players, but I only do that after I've actually watched a minute or two to see if it's interesting. Some kind of a browser-based streaming option is practically required to have a Youtube-esque in-band discovery experience (a roundabout way of saying "click around and waste 30 more minutes than you meant to").

thenomad2• 13 years ago

FWIW, when I distributed a feature film online a few years ago, I was very surprised to discover that our download numbers were 4x our streaming numbers, even given very short streams.

There are a number of reasons why that might have been in that particular case, but still, an interesting data point.

thenomad2• 13 years ago

Potentially interesting, particularly for people doing longer-form content, which does badly on YouTube but better on download.

leoedin• 13 years ago

One of YouTube's huge benefits is that it's an archive. Videos published in 2008 which get 10 views a year are still available. If a video had to be popular enough for someone to still be seeding it 5 years later, a huge amount of valuable content would just drop off the web.

Revisor• 13 years ago

The author ('s server) could serve as a perpetual seed. Or someone would step up for seeding, Internet archive or similar.

blake8086• 13 years ago

Is it valuable if it gets 10 views a year?

vacri• 13 years ago

Torrents are awful if not many people like the same things you like. Hooray, I'm downloading at the speed of someone's tiny upload limit! Similarly, downloading a file and having to find/reopen it is extra overhead that's annoying for a several-minute distraction that's a Vi Hart video.

vog• 13 years ago

Original article: http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...

HN Discussion to the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069

joelrunyon2• 13 years ago

What are the top main 3 competitors to youtube (besides vimeo).

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.

a3n• 13 years ago

I think the ultimate competitor for these kinds of things will be no competitor, when people can just post things "up there" that don't appear to be tied to any obviously identifiable gatekeeper.

joelrunyon2• 13 years ago

The benefit to youtube-type model is that there is an aggregator. There's a "channel" where people can bounce between interests.

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.

drcube• 13 years ago

They already have that. You might have heard of it, it's called "the web". :)

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.

myronbolitar• 13 years ago

Not that they wouldn't have ruined it, but Google must be kicking themselves for not trying more aggressively to buy Twitter years ago.

javanix• 13 years ago

I don't think this is a problem with G+ per se, just a bad sorting algorithm.

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.

thrillgore• 13 years ago

I just installed a userscript to hide the comments.

peterwwillis• 13 years ago

Why do we even need comments on YouTube?

bane• 13 years ago

It's kind of like reddit. On some very niche channels, there's actually "ok" discussions. Usually requests for more information that wasn't in the video...that sort of thing. It's not great discourse, but I've found it useful from time to time.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

On videos with a few hundred or few thousand views comments can add to the experience (e.g. discussing a video of a show you went to with other people). Once a video has hit the level of 'like this comment to get it to the top so x sees it' comments are useless.

mturmon• 13 years ago

Smart remark. Comments probably increase retention and re-visits.

A feature does not have to create a better experience for viewers with IQ above room temperature, in order to increase ad revenue.

highstep• 13 years ago

Comments on videos of the DIY nature are very helpful for increasing the breadth of information.

theklub• 13 years ago

Who actually reads youtube comments? Anyone here? They should just remove comments all together or allow only the video poster to create and approve comments.

slig• 13 years ago

+1. I don't see why there's so much whining. The YT comments are shit, and you'll be doing yourself a favor installing by a extension like this [1] (which, unfortunately, doesn't work with the new system yet)

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.

[1] http://www.tannr.com/herp-derp-youtube-comments/

sp3322• 13 years ago

Disabling comments and allowing only approved comments are options that uploaders can choose if they want. http://i.imgur.com/nhRsdK4.png

ceautery• 13 years ago

I like the idea of turning off comments, and then linking to a Reddit post in the video description. An alternative to that, should you not be balking at required G+ integration, is visiting the comment management[1] page. It should be possible to build a vetted user base with the tools there.

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".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/comment_management

adamb_• 13 years ago

In the entirety of my YouTube use (circa 2006!) I think I've left ~3 comments. I've never seen comments as a core feature of why I use YouTube so this won't change my perceived usefulness of it.

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...

tantalor• 13 years ago

promoting hateful inflammatory comments because they provoke responses

Please don't feed the trolls.

alexeisadeski3• 13 years ago

Never saw the issue with YouTube comments. Always was much ado about nothing. So people were immature - it's funny. So people were insulting - grow up, they're having fun.

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.

perlpimp• 13 years ago

http://youtu.be/jQjocZXHOg4

to the point video from discussion on the site about the article.

2c.

jamesbritt7• 13 years ago

... now her regular, good commenters comments hover at the bottom of the pile, while hateful trolls whose messages generate a lot of replies are judged "good" by G+ and promoted to the top.

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.

sixQuarks• 13 years ago

I can't believe no one has said anything about this yet, but the big problem with youtube comments is the way they're ranked. By replies, not by upvotes. Whoever decided on that needs to be fired.

knodi• 13 years ago

This is the perfect time for Youtube alternatives to come into the market.

kunai• 13 years ago

Why not post her original comments? http://vihart.com/

migrantgeek• 13 years ago

I wasn't aware so many people cared about YouTube comments.

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.

joshdance• 13 years ago

I think it would be interesting to have a tagging system on comments. For example you could tag comments as "abusive" "trollish" "insightful" "funny" etc. If enough people tagged a comment as abusive or trollish it would be hidden. Of course there are still huge problems with this, but it would be an interesting experiment.

DanBC• 13 years ago

I'm just waiting for MySpace to allow simple video sharing and a subscribe box THAT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS, and they'll take over.

mcphilip2• 13 years ago

From the perspective of a content consumer without a youtube account, the quality of the service continues to decrease. The most basic use case of uploading and linking to or embedding content remains invaluable, but functionality facilitating content exploration has noticeably diminished over time. This can clearly be seen in the list of suggested videos presented to the user for each video being watched.

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.

bentcorner2• 13 years ago

Without data it's hard to tell what is actually going on. I suspect that an algorithmic focused company like Google is aware of click-after (or whatever it's called) rates of videos on youtube.

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.

Fr0styMatt• 13 years ago

I think we can somewhat offer Google the benefit of the doubt here too. It's likely that there's someone else targeting Google's algorithm to get that spammy video suggested to as many people as possible.

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.

hrjet2• 13 years ago

Another problem with the "suggested videos list" is: there is no quick way to know how many people liked (or disliked) the suggested video, and their suggestion algorithm doesn't take that into account!!

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.

dmerfield• 13 years ago

This Chrome extension shows the like/dislike ratio of each related video:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-ratings-pr...

It's unbelievable that Youtube hasn't implemented this themselves yet.

nawitus• 13 years ago

Google, understandably, wants to increase metrics related to time spent on site since it facilitates selling ads.

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.

mkramlich• 13 years ago

reminded of this:

die young enough a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

argonaut• 13 years ago

The problem is that search engine != video sharing site.

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.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

So your videos are going to be available as torrents from your own site? Good luck growing your audience.

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).

jamesbritt7• 13 years ago

Interesting tweet from Vi Hart:

I repeat, I have no plans to stop uploading to YouTube. I like @doctorow but that article's title was sensationalist and quite incorrect.

https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576

dinkumthinkum3• 13 years ago

I mean this I. All seriousness, I prefer YouTube comments the way they were. These comments provided a great data point for determing how large oercebtages of humans really are. Forcing these G+ real name stuff is just like sticking your head in the sand and pretending that much of the world online, not just on places like Stormfront, is a cesspool of racism, ignorance, and hate. Myself, I prefer to see things as they are.

r0h1n• 13 years ago

On Twitter, Vi Hart denies this: https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576

"I repeat, I have no plans to stop uploading to YouTube. I like @doctorow but that article's title was sensationalist and quite incorrect."

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

This, perhaps more than anything else, should be a huge red flag for Google. Vi Hart is the epitome of what Youtube was born to be, an enabler of talent discovery like no other. Losing this would be a huge blow.

anonymous• 13 years ago

As the old adage goes: NEVER EVER build your business as completely dependent atop a Microsoft product. Or if you must, expect to go out of business at some point. In the 21st century, you can replace Microsoft with Google or Facebook or whatever else pops up that gets to their level. I'm willing to bet people will next be burned by relying too much on AWS.

just2n2• 13 years ago

Is there any development into an open and free video sharing site similar to what YT used to be? Something where the users of the site are actually the customers and are treated as such?

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.

jff5• 13 years ago

open and free video sharing site
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.

just2n2• 13 years ago

Both. They aren't mutually exclusive. I don't believe ads are a valid source of monetization. Once you start showing ads, you invariably become evil.

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.

tn13• 13 years ago

I have resisted the Google+ Tyranny for long. I have refused to vote my fav. apps on Android, I refuse to comment on youtube videos and so on.

Vi Hart: cramming G+ into YouTube has made comments even worse, I'm leaving

Related Stories