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Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

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Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#71

What happened to "don't be evil"? The criticism is a bit thick, but the prompts to join G+ are increasingly manipulative and gimmicky, designed almost entirely to _trick_ the user to into signing up + spamming their gmail contacts. A requirement to have G+ account to make youtube comments is just one part of a greater trend that includes: 1. Requiring a G+ account to review Android apps in the Play store 2. Cunningly…

> You know G+ is an abysmal failure when the Page & Co has to force it on users of google's other services. C'mon bro, what gives?

They literally have been explaining this for nearly a year. There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things.

I think if anything what this has proven is that you cannot rely on your customers to read the slightest thing from you, but if you change how they expect things to work, they will get incredibly angry even if the service is totally free. Even if you are IMPROVING the service you will get anger.

Moral of the story: Don't have many customers.

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#72
post #16

This isn't just to make commenting more social (i.e. pushing friends comments to the top)-- I imagine it's also largely to hold more people accountable for their comments (w/ their reputation) so that there aren't as many nonsense/flame/bigoted comments like there always have been on Youtube, and in turn get higher quality comments (e.g. Quora vs. Yahoo answers analogy)

The accountability argument only holds if Real Name is 100% enforced, which so far hasn't happened. (and if Blizzard's Real ID fiasco is any indication, it never will.)

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#73

YouTube comments have long been reviled as the worst of the worst the internet has to offer. I don't know why people seem to want the status quo.

Because there is probably a lot of overlap between those who think Youtube comments are terrible and those who post terrible Youtube comments.

People might slag it in public, but I think a lot of people secretly enjoy leaving abusive and trollish anonymous comments. It's not like all those comments were the work of a few bad apples. The sheer volume would suggest otherwise.

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#74
post #20

I've pretty much given up. Google has deleted my playlists and favorites countless times. Every time they try to integrate YouTube with one of their services/account management, I end up losing everything. My only consolation is that Google+ is accumulating a lot of vitriol and hate across the web. It's shaping up to be the most hated "social" product in the entire Internet.

I've never had this happen and I've had a YouTube account for a while. This honestly sounds like a bug of some sort. Have you found other people experiencing this?

I was hesitant to share this video[1] on HN, but I came upon this in my research when the same thing happened to me.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs

Edit: NSFW- language/curse words.

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#76

Because YouTube comments were completely useless, and now the company is trying to make them useful / interesting. If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. That was completely impossible, the old way.

"If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. That was completely impossible, the old way."

I keep seeing companies pushing this idea on us, but I just don't get it. The math doesn't work. There are umpty millions of pieces of "content" that might be reviewed. I have at most a few hundred actual friends. (I imagine those who push beyond that have also pushed well beyond the intimacy frontier where they really care what you think about YouTube Video #283572738.) The median number of reviews that a given friend is likely to generate in a sufficiently formal manner that Google can figure it out is zero.

If you live in some sort of bizarre homogenous bubble where all your friends are just like you and have effectively the same tastes, and a lot of your friends insist on reviewing every last Youtube video they see, and yet, have some sort of diversity of opinion that you might actually care about, this might work.

But even stereotypical college students don't live like this. Maybe frat houses, but even then, you've got family circles, other non-frat friends, etc, and I doubt your frat brothers are going to be sitting there churning out enough reviews on things that you all care about that seeing a review from someone you "know" is going to be anything other than an exceptional occurrence, and a review you care about even less so. ("Yes, my frat brothers love the latest Call of Duty. I could tell that by the way we all played it for 14 hours straight last night. I did not need Google+ to tell me that.")

(If they did sit there and review everything, it would just turn into a backchannel for chat anyhow... "This beer is awesome, just ask John about last night... here's a link to some photos that the beer company would pay good money not to have associated with their beer...")

I'm not saying that there's absolutely nobody this will be useful for, but it seems to be a very, very specialized group of people hardly worth the immense effort being put into this idea by companies. The amount of possible "things to review" just swamps the number of friends a person can have, and standard lurker/poster ratios tend to imply that "nobody" writes reviews. (And I gotta think these sites have even worse lurker/poster ratios than something like Usenet or HN, probably by an order of magnitude or two or three.)

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#77
post #20

I've pretty much given up. Google has deleted my playlists and favorites countless times. Every time they try to integrate YouTube with one of their services/account management, I end up losing everything. My only consolation is that Google+ is accumulating a lot of vitriol and hate across the web. It's shaping up to be the most hated "social" product in the entire Internet.

I hate Google+, I'm sending back my Nexus 5, it's useless without Google+.

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#78

Because YouTube comments were completely useless, and now the company is trying to make them useful / interesting. If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. That was completely impossible, the old way.

A feature that "would be really cool" is one that should be opt-in. I think this is the real issue that shows it self over and over again: forcing users into services they do not want.

IMO Google could have avoided most of the backlash by making every youtube account a G+ account too, then if you want to link the two, have a simple merge account functionality between G+ and YouTube. The Charlie Foxtrot of forcing real names and linked accounts has obvious motivations for Google, but the backlash was predictable and isn't going away.

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#79

What happened to "don't be evil"? The criticism is a bit thick, but the prompts to join G+ are increasingly manipulative and gimmicky, designed almost entirely to _trick_ the user to into signing up + spamming their gmail contacts. A requirement to have G+ account to make youtube comments is just one part of a greater trend that includes: 1. Requiring a G+ account to review Android apps in the Play store 2. Cunningly…

> You know G+ is an abysmal failure when the Page & Co has to force it on users of google's other services. C'mon bro, what gives? They literally have been explaining this for nearly a year. There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things. I think if anything what this has proven is that you cannot rely on your customers to read the slightest thing from you, but if you change ho…

No. Moral of the story is "Don't fuck around".

I like my YouTube account. I don't like Google+. Stop forcing it on me. I'd be happy with a YouTube that doesn't let me comment but let's me upload videos and everything else I'm doing now. Instead, I'm packing up and leaving.

The irony is your moral might just work. Google will end up with less and less customers if they keep behaving in this way. Only people willing to tolerate Google+ will be left. Maybe that's what they want.

Re: Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years

#80
post #55

A few weeks ago, YouTube started automatically signing me into my Google+ account (which I was forced into getting) rather than my YouTube account -- which has years of favorites and other content. I'm getting sick of it. I only signed up to Google+ because my friend wanted to use Hangouts. Now it's screwed up my YouTube channel and I can't revert it. The only reason I post on YouTube is to share small clips with peo…

Yeah, they keep insisting on logging me into google+. I keep declining but I somehow ended up with an account. I detest forced integration and such. I enjoy the free email but I'm thinking of switching to Opera's email spin-off.

Rather pay and know what I'm getting than not pay and not know.

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