You all know my opinion on it. (CLAPS LOUDLY) but what do YOU all think?
YouTube comment sections are, without exception, completely awful. It doesn’t matter what you’re watching — scroll down from your video of a baby orangutan cradling a basket of kittens in it’s arms and you’ll find 90% of the comments are horrifically racist and/or homophobic, arguing about something completely unrelated to the video or spam.
Well, it looks like YouTube has, at long last, decided to do something about their comment sections being the absolute butthole of the Internet. There’s some changes coming to YouTube-ville, such as…
Filters
Believe it or not, until now this didn’t exist. Now the poster of a video can set certain words to be filtered and any comments with those words will be flagged and need approval to go up. The filter will also catch intentionally misspelled naughty words. You can also ban certain users from commenting on your videos altogether.
Threaded Conversations
Yes, believe it or not, YouTube didn’t have this either. Now people can actually have conversations instead of just responded to whatever gibberish happens to be on the first couple pages of comments.
Good Comment Promoting Algorithms
Up until now, the first comments you see when you scroll down are whatever nonsense is the most recent, or whatever the assholes commenting on the video upvoted the most. Not a great system. Now YouTube is promising magical algorithms that will find good, constructive comments from people you like and promote them to the first page. Seems like something that shouldn’t actually work, but hey, YouTube is owned by Google, and Google can do anything.
So yeah, will this fix YouTube comments overnight? Of course not, but hey, it’s not like things can get much worse. What do you, the most excellent Uproxx commentariat, think of these changes?
via Gizmodo
Read more: http://www.uproxx.com/gammasquad/20...set-become-somewhat-less-awful/#ixzz2gC2agIAZ
Steven Colbert also put his take on it:
Stephen Colbert attacked YouTube for adding advanced comment moderation features on his show Wednesday night, calling it an “unprecedented attack on free speech” and asking his viewers to retaliate by adding a spammy comment to every YouTube video they come across.
Check out the entire segment here: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-co...ember-25-2013/censorship-for-youtube-comments
The folks at Google don’t seem to be too bothered about the spam attack. Chief Google+ Architect Yonatan Zunger posted a tounge-in-cheek reply to Colbert on Google+ Thursday morning, which read in part:
Zunger went on to say that filtering out comments from Colbert viewers wasn’t much of a challenge for his team:
another blogger posted his thoughts:
I am a big fan of YouTube. I particularly enjoy videos by iJustine and Chris Pirillo. While the videos are great, the comments usually aren't. Quite frankly, YouTube comments are often vulgar, racist and upsetting -- an overall blemish on humanity in my opinion.
Today, Google announces that "starting this week, you’ll see the new YouTube comments powered by Google+ on your channel discussion tab. This update will come to comments on all videos later this year, as we bring you more ways to connect with familiar faces on YouTube."
The company highlights the following changes:
For example, what if a political candidate posted a video but blocked their opponent's name from comments. Or, what if a recording artist blocks words that have a negative sentiment, to give the illusion of widespread praise. In both of these examples, free speech is curtailed to the video owner's benefit.
Google also mentions auto-approving comments by certain "fans". However, what if a video owner only approves fans that are of a certain race, religion or sexual orientation? YouTube could become a hot-spot for segregation.
Free speech is arguably not a legal issue here since YouTube is not a Government-owned site. However, Google should still be held accountable since it hosts political debates and is a large proponent of a free-internet.
Overall, the benefits simply do not outweigh the potential abuses. While cleaning-up YouTube comments is a much needed task, censorship is not the answer -- even in the hands of the users.
What do you think, is giving video owners the ability to block certain words of their choosing a good idea? Tell me in the comments.
YouTube comment sections are, without exception, completely awful. It doesn’t matter what you’re watching — scroll down from your video of a baby orangutan cradling a basket of kittens in it’s arms and you’ll find 90% of the comments are horrifically racist and/or homophobic, arguing about something completely unrelated to the video or spam.
Well, it looks like YouTube has, at long last, decided to do something about their comment sections being the absolute butthole of the Internet. There’s some changes coming to YouTube-ville, such as…
Filters
Believe it or not, until now this didn’t exist. Now the poster of a video can set certain words to be filtered and any comments with those words will be flagged and need approval to go up. The filter will also catch intentionally misspelled naughty words. You can also ban certain users from commenting on your videos altogether.
Threaded Conversations
Yes, believe it or not, YouTube didn’t have this either. Now people can actually have conversations instead of just responded to whatever gibberish happens to be on the first couple pages of comments.
Good Comment Promoting Algorithms
Up until now, the first comments you see when you scroll down are whatever nonsense is the most recent, or whatever the assholes commenting on the video upvoted the most. Not a great system. Now YouTube is promising magical algorithms that will find good, constructive comments from people you like and promote them to the first page. Seems like something that shouldn’t actually work, but hey, YouTube is owned by Google, and Google can do anything.
So yeah, will this fix YouTube comments overnight? Of course not, but hey, it’s not like things can get much worse. What do you, the most excellent Uproxx commentariat, think of these changes?
via Gizmodo
Read more: http://www.uproxx.com/gammasquad/20...set-become-somewhat-less-awful/#ixzz2gC2agIAZ
Steven Colbert also put his take on it:
Stephen Colbert attacked YouTube for adding advanced comment moderation features on his show Wednesday night, calling it an “unprecedented attack on free speech” and asking his viewers to retaliate by adding a spammy comment to every YouTube video they come across.
Check out the entire segment here: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-co...ember-25-2013/censorship-for-youtube-comments
The folks at Google don’t seem to be too bothered about the spam attack. Chief Google+ Architect Yonatan Zunger posted a tounge-in-cheek reply to Colbert on Google+ Thursday morning, which read in part:
Zunger went on to say that filtering out comments from Colbert viewers wasn’t much of a challenge for his team:
“ This particular post was a large number of text-identical copies of a post with a link to an unsubtle spam site in it, so let’s just say that it was slightly less ambiguous than normal. 
”
YouTube added additional ways to filter and moderate comments earlier this week, allowing video uploaders to filter certain words or ban individual viewers from commenting on their videos.”
another blogger posted his thoughts:
I am a big fan of YouTube. I particularly enjoy videos by iJustine and Chris Pirillo. While the videos are great, the comments usually aren't. Quite frankly, YouTube comments are often vulgar, racist and upsetting -- an overall blemish on humanity in my opinion.
Today, Google announces that "starting this week, you’ll see the new YouTube comments powered by Google+ on your channel discussion tab. This update will come to comments on all videos later this year, as we bring you more ways to connect with familiar faces on YouTube."
The company highlights the following changes:
- Comments you care about move to the top: You’ll see posts at the top of the list from the video’s creator, popular personalities, engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles.
- Join the conversation publicly or privately: You can choose to start a conversation so that it is seen by everyone on YouTube and Google+, only people in your Circles or just your bestie. Like Gmail, replies are threaded so you can easily follow conversations.
- Better ways to moderate comments: You have new tools to review comments before they’re posted, block certain words or save time by auto-approving comments from certain fans. These can help you spend less time moderating, and more time sharing videos and connecting with your fans.
For example, what if a political candidate posted a video but blocked their opponent's name from comments. Or, what if a recording artist blocks words that have a negative sentiment, to give the illusion of widespread praise. In both of these examples, free speech is curtailed to the video owner's benefit.
Google also mentions auto-approving comments by certain "fans". However, what if a video owner only approves fans that are of a certain race, religion or sexual orientation? YouTube could become a hot-spot for segregation.
Free speech is arguably not a legal issue here since YouTube is not a Government-owned site. However, Google should still be held accountable since it hosts political debates and is a large proponent of a free-internet.
Overall, the benefits simply do not outweigh the potential abuses. While cleaning-up YouTube comments is a much needed task, censorship is not the answer -- even in the hands of the users.
What do you think, is giving video owners the ability to block certain words of their choosing a good idea? Tell me in the comments.
