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After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

support.google.com

21–30 of 79 posts

Re: After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

#22

How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network? Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment…

I also don't understand this, just like the decision to remove certain features over time.

Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it.

While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders.

I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment.

[0] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did...

Re: After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

#23

How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network? Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment…

I also don't understand this, just like the decision to remove certain features over time. Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it. While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language bor…

I couldn't even manage the other day to get Google Translate to translate a YouTube page so I could read comments mostly written in cyrillic to a Russian video about the protests over there.

Perhaps I was doing something wrong (I don't think so), perhaps it's because I use Firefox and this was a gentle nudge to get me to try in Chrome, or perhaps it's just another one of Google's infuriating and perplexing 'quirks'.

Re: After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

#24

How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network? Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment…

[deleted]

Re: After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

#25

How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network? Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment…

I also don't understand this, just like the decision to remove certain features over time. Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it. While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language bor…

Because in the current data-snowflake regulatory and legislative climate, it’s too tough to get away with monetising content sent in a ‘private’ context. Googles business model relies on being able to index and advertise to every phrase you post, but I’m sure they don’t want to run into the same issues fb has, because fb posts have an expectation of privacy. Hence google has no interest in providing a private messaging platform.

Re: After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

#27

How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network? Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment…

Everyone on HN seems to assume that Google has some sort of grand master product plan.

News at 11 : they most certainly don't, as can be ascertained by the gigantic random walk their product update strategy has been in the last few years.

Observing them from the outside, I sometimes even come to doubt their grand master business plan (I'm assuming they have one of those, which is also a doubtful proposition) is to make money.

Re: After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

#28

How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network? Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment…

> Has google entirely given up on getting a social network?

The problem is moderation. Youtube has enough on their hands dealing with trolls, conspiracy crap, spam, Nazis/other hate speech, propaganda, pedophiles, animal/child abusers, terrorists, copyright, ... - they don't really have the resources to deal with the inevitable sausagefests in the inboxes of women and the other hate that this feature would be used if it were more widely known.

Their obscure social networks (g+, Reader, ...) are/were niche enough to not attract too many abusers of all kind.

Re: After September 18th, you’ll no longer be able to send messages on YouTube

#30
This is sad. As someone who loves browsing the "hidden" side of YT where videos and channels with sub 3 and 4 digit viewcount lurk and discovering weird obscure content, this feature was a godsend. I have been able to contact users that otherwise leave absolutely no contact info on their pages to ask them about certain content they have uploaded on multiple occasions.

I really dislike how stuff like twitter and Instagram have become the standard form of reaching anyone, as I have neither and your messages can very easily become ignored due to the very nature of how these two social networks operate.

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