If you’ve been anywhere near YouTube in the last day, you’ve doubtlessly noticed it’s been acting a little funny. A pop-up screen appears, blocking the comments from you (mostly) and informs you that YouTube has been making a few changes.
Those changes are in the form of three simple functions: 1. Comments you care about move to the top, 2. An option to join the conversation publicly or privately, 3. An easier method for moderating the comments. And as speculated on, the commenters will have to sign in via their Google+ accounts, so no more “faceless voice.”
YouTube first breathed wind of this back in September with a blog post informing people that changes were impending (why the hell didn’t NMR cover this back then?! Oh that’s right, we were on “vacation.” Check with Poland — punch was served). And while the new comments section is doubtlessly going to work out for the best as it eliminates spam and chops down on the trolls eventually — for the moment, the trolls are still firmly entrenched. Even on YouTube’s blog site, the top comments are people pissing and moaning about Google+ and the YouTube Gestapo (my words) allowing only comments praising the new functions to survive and thrive — so clearly, that’s not the case. It’ll be interesting to see in the coming weeks how effective the system winds up being.
As explained in the official blog post by Product Manager Nundu Janakiram and Principal Engineer Yonatan Zunger, whose team has been at work on this for the last year, “YouTube comments will become conversations that matter to you.”
Forget winter coming — the new YouTube comments section is here. Trolls are an inevitability though — how long until they crack the code and everything goes right back to the way it was?
For more trolls online, check out these fine links:
Easy Pickings: Stupid Trolls Get Pwned In Their Retorts To Girl Gamers [VIDEOS]
Twitter to Develop ‘DVR Mode’ to Replay Live Events, Also Aim to Eliminate Cyberbullying
In Light Of Twitter’s New ‘Abuse’ Button, Here Are The Top 10 Mass Twitter Attacks
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