Intellectual heights known only to YouTube
YouTube’s comments really suck. In fact, most of the videos suck too, but every comment is pretty much awful. This is problem most likely came around because of the size of the community just exploded, there’s no reason to be held with any respect.
Places like reddit are still in that point where they don’t have too many users, so the quality of comments is still pretty high. Talk in text speak and you’ll be down voted to oblivion. Whereas on YouTube that seems an okay thing to do.
Each video – even really obscure videos – always seems to have a new comment thread made within the last day or so, making it impossible to have an actual, productive conversation.
There’s also a problem with threads… If you click “reply” to most threads, you just start another thread… Sometimes it works as a nested comment, like expected.
So, to fix the problems we need a smaller community, with more power for each user to vote on the smarts of each comment… We obviously can’t get rid of 90% of the YouTube community, but why can’t we just ignore it?
I was thinking someone should make a Greasemonkey script which removes all the comments on videos, and replaces it with comments maintained by someone else’s service. The new service obviously won’t be adopted by 99% of the current YouTube raff so we’ll get a smaller, more sophisticated society of people commenting on videos.
I like this idea. Someone should do it, or maybe I should.
Edit: Looking into this more, you can probably use the Disqus API.
Youtube’s comments, it’s dirty. One reason is that YouTube is big. When you say videos, chances are you’ll think of YouTube. How did YouTube get that popular? I don’t know, but still, it’s big, you don’t hear kids talking about Veoh than Youtube, and on Safari’s default bookmark, it includes YouTube. Newgrounds, it’s not bigger than YouTube, and they have stupid users; but it’s small, making the deviants small enough for the moderators and users to take action. Who thought popularity is better? This is one of the factors of these youtube comments, the deviants are huge, the moderators can’t take them all down. But there are still more factors that can explain youtube comments.
There’s a way to disable youtube comments. Just open up a page that contains a video, scroll down to the Text comments (x), click on options, check the Hide all comments option, and save. It’s a good solution to this issue. Mixing YouTube and its comment is like mixing freshwater with mud.
Also, Yahoo Answer has the same issue.
Having an option that blocks comments from individuals below age 20 would be nice.
It would be interesting to see a statistic that illustrates the correlation between retardedness and the age of youtube commenters.
After all, retarded comments from adults are still bearable. ITS THE GODDAMNED PUNKS. ALWAYS. THOSE GODDAMNED FUCKING RASCAL SHOULD REALLY GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY YOUTUBE COMMENT LAWN.
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A voting system is useless. I can post a comment on a game video by saying that a PC is better for gaming than a console and back it up with arguments, link and other sources and I would still be voted out.
jdonner, I disagree. If you made a good comment like you’re describing on a place like reddit then people would upvote you even if they disagreed. “Votes” are to encourage conversation, not to decide if a comment is good or not.
I’ve always thought the comment system used by Slashdot is pretty good. It’s vote based, but you get votes to cast with karma. The conversations are threaded. And they are categorized as being funny or interesting. Of course there are still trolls, but those are quickly weeded out.