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

Sad. They simply should give content producers the option of whether they want to receive messages or not. (Similar to how you can turn comments on or off). This way, individuals who received "targeted harassment" could be free of it, and other individuals who don't have this problem, or are more thick-skinned or tolerant, can receive messages. (One complaint in a recent lawsuit against YouTube is that Google allow users to "harass" content creators. See https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/lgbtq-youtube-lawsuit-... ). I'm sympathetic to their concerns, and turning off the ability to write messages or contact is one solution. There are already some controls available.

I've used these messages quite a bit to contact people with similar "niche" interests (restoring old electronic equipment from WWII era through the 60s) and it's very useful.

I've been using YouTube since it came out and today was the first time I've heard you could send messages.

I'm guessing it is an under-used feature and causing more harm overall than good. I'm assuming they expect folks to communicate on video comments if they want to talk about the video in question.

Yeah, why they don't just integrate YouTube with Google+. What could possibly go wrong?

That's impossible to do. A feature like that would be fairly simple to implement, and would make sense, so it can't be done by Google. Google products always have to have some kind of glaring missing feature.

An example I found not long ago is with Google Photos. If you create an album, you can offer to share that album with other people, through their Google account, their phone number, their email, etc. If they accept the invitation, it notifies you and their little circle darkens. If not, it stays light, and still stays in your list of people you've shared with. There's no way to actually remove these unused invites, and these people just stick around as "ghosts" forever. The only way to clean this mess up, according to Google, is to turn off all sharing of your album, and then re-share with everyone you want to share it with, so they all have to re-accept the share invitation (and you have to manually enter in every email address, phone number, etc. again). There's no way to just remove one of these "ghosts", even though you'd think this is a very basic admin task. There's forums where people have complained about this for years, and there is a Google person on there who just complains about people using the forum for complaining like this instead of filing an "official" feature request (which as we all know never goes anywhere), even though this Google person could very well do this herself instead of complaining about all the complaints.