What the f*&^ have they done to YouTube Comments?!

[Varrok]

A couple of things. It was proclaimed as a celebration of how unique everyone's channel was, when it really just took away all but the shallowest of customization. Channels now looked a lot less distinguishable. The immediate recognizability of many channels was discarded for one (very weirdly sized) banner, and that's about it. Perhaps not the biggest problem, perhaps a favourable change to many, but it was not popular amongst creators.

It also made a lot of partner perks redundant. Before, it used to be the case that you needed certain numbers of subscribers and views to earn the ability to upload banners, create thumbnails, add links to your banner, etc. It encouraged quality, audience engagement and platform loyalty to grow your channel. With it gone, what could networks offer to entice creators? This was, if I recall, near simultaneous with YouTube allowing anybody to monetize videos, not just partners. Which is a lovely idea, but the total ad prices didn't increase. Everybody's joint earnings were spread thinner, mostly amongst smaller channels earning too little to ever actually claim it. How unfortunate for YouTube to have to be holding all of that cash for them...

The bigger problem, though, was that it stopped audiences from viewing content on a channel's home page. It added an extra page load to watching the latest content (and when you're designing user interfaces, the rule of thumb is that each page halves your audience), but even worse was that it discarded a whole metric. The amount of video views on your home page was a major calculation in your earnings, and without it everybody's earnings plummeted. There was no warning. The networks had no immediate solution. Everybody had to switch back to the old style or go broke, knowing that snowflake would be mandatory soon. I believe they fixed this at least.


What Varrok said, coupled with a slew of bugs. You can't reply to comments left before the change. When you delete a comment, it deletes everything classed as a reply whether you want it to or not. Sometimes none of the comments that are left will show up. It's screwing with our audience engagement and we had no choice or forewarning. But bugs can be fixed. Bad design can be fixed. There are some nice features. But you have to be on Google Plus, because Google gots to have the big data on you.

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim left his first comment in eight years in response to the new comment system.

Oh.... oh. Ups. When you first mentioned "snowflake update" on youtube, I wasn't sure which one you really meant, so I googled this and found this... I really believed you were talking about this D:

You can't reply to comments left before the change. When you delete a comment, it deletes everything classed as a reply whether you want it to or not. Sometimes none of the comments that are left will show up.

WHAT?! I didn't even know that... it's unbelievably lame

[Varrok]

That one's old. This is fresh news:


SHIT DOUBLE POST. PLEASE DON'T BAN ME

[Rex Tirano]

Nate has his banhammer ready!

Also, I don't comment on Youtube so I don't really care. But I didn't realise there had been so many issues with things for Youtube creators.

- Rexy

[Auriel]

On a related note, I'm not sure who this message

One account. All of Google.

on google's new login page is meant to impress.

[MA]

Youtube always has been a piece of scum. i'm always raging over it, and i don't even use it to upload. i just watch stuff. it's fucking shit and makes my computer lag most of the time with all their bullshit advertisements. seriously, if there was one thing i could get rid of, it would be that. bullshit adverts about bullshit i don't give a bullshit about. bullshit.

[Varrok]

Why won't you just use adblock?

[MA]

it's a pain having to install that kind of shit all the time though, and keep up with the holes they keep poking through to show me another advert on muslim dating. i have Flashblock to reduce lag, but i resent having to add yet more shit to my browser to stop their crap. i just wish they were more generally computer-friendly.

and even now, as if on cue, Youtube just crashed. motherless fuck.

[Varrok]

Adblock is relatively quick to install and has a prepared list of ads to block. You don't have to add every ad to block it manually, silly. Just update the list like, each month or so

[Vyrien]

Why on earth would you want to get rid of singlemuslim.com? You must be out of your mind.

Also yes, but don't use adblock plus if you don't like fiddling around because they let youtube show in-video ads now. The soulless cunts.

[Manco]

I use AdBlock Plus and have never manually updated my lists, nor do I ever see Youtube ads.

[Oddey]

...another advert on muslim dating...

I get adverts for baby massages. Sometimes the absurdity of the adverts I get makes me less inclined to wish them away.

[STM]

What pisses me off about Youtube ... but is probably the fault of my laptop, is that if I have music playing in one tab and I try doing ... anything else in another tab, it has to buffer every fucking second but as soon as I click back onto Youtube it's fine as the summer blue sky.

[Nepsotic]

Just change your tab priority.

[Auriel]

What pisses me off about Youtube ... but is probably the fault of my laptop, is that if I have music playing in one tab and I try doing ... anything else in another tab, it has to buffer every fucking second but as soon as I click back onto Youtube it's fine as the summer blue sky.

I circumvent that problem by opening the video in a new window and keeping it open behind w/e I happen to be browsing at that moment.

[MeechMunchie]

Forget AdBlock, Ghostery is where it's at. That takes care of in-video ads as well as trackers. You can feel smug about reducing Google's data haul, as well as its ad revenue!

[Wil]

That awkward thread where everyone follows my rants about how YouTubers' earnings have been slashed with suggestions of how to slash them further.

[DarkHoodness]

I tolerate watching ads over having adblock for this reason... Just I wish that my responses to "Show me ads like this" on YouTube would actually do something if they're going to bother asking me that.

E: Shame that Google are getting further out of touch with its user base, and that there's not much decent competition for their services - It'd probably give them an incentive to not upset their users, rather than them being able to get away with doing whatever they want without the fear of people abandoning them en mass.

Also, I dunno why they don't realise that YouTube comments have always been a cesspool and that you can't polish a turd. Churning it up just makes it stink more. And who thought that letting people post URLs in comments was a good idea?

[MeechMunchie]

That awkward thread where everyone follows my rants about how YouTubers' earnings have been slashed with suggestions of how to slash them further.

Does the word "whitelist" mean anything to you?

[STM]

Just change your tab priority.

I ... did not know you could do that. Off to Google! (ironically)

I circumvent that problem by opening the video in a new window and keeping it open behind w/e I happen to be browsing at that moment.

That doesn't always work for me, it's a real catch 22 of whether or not I can get it going. I was listening to the MMLP2 album the other day on full 1080p with another four tabs open but the day before that it wasn't working right on 360p.

That awkward thread where everyone follows my rants about how YouTubers' earnings have been slashed with suggestions of how to slash them further.

Is there a way to selectively choose which channels you can watch adverts on? Jaltoid did a video explaining why adblock hurt their revenue and I was going to just unblock them but I can't find out if you can unblock individual channels or the whole of YouTube.

[Nate]

catch 22

Replace 'word' with 'phrase'.

[Wil]

Does the word "whitelist" mean anything to you?

Is there a way to selectively choose which channels you can watch adverts on? Jaltoid did a video explaining why adblock hurt their revenue and I was going to just unblock them but I can't find out if you can unblock individual channels or the whole of YouTube.

As far as I've ever used it, you specify the whitelist according to URIs. And since the URI of videos on YouTube don't contain any ID of the channel, no.

And who thought that letting people post URLs in comments was a good idea?

It gets better! You can't post links in comments on livestreams. That includes the person livestreaming on their own channel who wants to give a link to their audience.

[Varrok]

There are, like, 76 000 signatures under the famous anti-comment-system-change petition. YouTube still doesn't really give a shit.

[MA]

of course they don't give a shit, they don't have to. that's what makes them cunts. and stupid. and very short-sighted. if you keep up the game of pissing off your only users then some other firm is eventually going to challenge and take your place, riding on the back of the slogan "do you hate Youtube? then join us, we're nothing like them!" up to the point where they knock YT out of the playing field for good and slowly become cunts themselves. goddamn cycles.

[STM]

Fuck you Nate. Fuck you. =(

[MA]

[MeechMunchie]

Seriously though, what do you think "Catch-22" means?

[Wil]

Also, turns out Google is actually listening to people being whiny! http://goo.gl/yFlGW8

I don't get it.

But seriously, they have been deleting all/many negative feedback comments they get.

[STM]

I didn't think it meant that. I thought it was like...well...I've been tired the last few days. Putting anything even vaguely coherent together is a great success.

[Havoc]

Meh. Like any other update on YouTube this is something that you just learn to deal with over time. Though this is taking noticeably longer to get used to. I made my page, linked it, filled it out and everything seems to be working okay (except for the retarded spam check thing).

I can see the potential use for having a social network tied in directly with a commenting system (how many websites use Facebook as a commenting system?) and Google probably has a good vision on the matter. But as a websites Google+ is just horribly designed. I've tried a couple of times to figure out how that place works and I just can't figure it out.

Facebook is straight forward. You go to the site and you see recent posts. On Google+ I see 3 different columns with random info on I don't know what the hell.

I think the only thing this will do is create a whole lot of new pages on Google+ that are never going to be used for more than commenting on videos. As a YouTube creator I really want to figure out how to use my page to increase my viewership, but currently it's such a big mess that I just can't be bothered, really.

Competition would be nice, but unless someone has about a billion dollars to build a data center, fill it with hardware and start selling ads on a scale like Google, I think they pretty much have a monopoly on this. Unless... you know... Bing Video... *Shudder*.

[MA]

Competition would be nice, but unless someone has about a billion dollars to build a data center, fill it with hardware and start selling ads on a scale like Google, I think they pretty much have a monopoly on this. Unless... you know... Bing Video... *Shudder*.

if you're referring to YouTube with this, i think you're wrong. YouTube won't own the majority forever, i reckon eventually they'll just meld with a bigger corporation. maybe Google, which would be enforcing your point really. i admit Google has more fingers in pies than Aunt Bessie on crack. but like you said, Bing Video is another contender, as god awful as it is. all the video hosting sites are, just by existing they're taking a portion of the market. they have to be otherwise they wouldn't exist.

mark my words, just give it time. yootoob is going down one way or another.