YouTube’s commenting system has never been really well-structured, in my opinion. But in the past few days, the system went from okay to just plain bad.
While the old system had its flaws, it worked and that is absolutely essential. The new commenting system? It fails at adding any useful features, and it barely works.
Before, you could up/downvote comments, reply to comments, and flag comments. Now, you can only do that with a handful of comments, if you’re lucky.
Besides the lack of essential features, there also seems to be a ton of clutter from Google+. Now, I’m seeing a lot of “[someone] shared this on Google+”. Okay, that’s nice, but do you really have to put this fact in the comments section? It doesn’t add any meaningful discussion.
With these “comments”, you can actually like, reply, or report abuse. I find the reporting abuse thing silly. What, we’re going to report someone sharing a video that can be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection?
In the spirit of constructive criticism, however, I will offer some features that I would actually like to see in the commenting system:
- Threaded comments, something like what Discus has. No more “in reply to” links all over the place
- More ways of sorting comments: e.g. oldest, newest, most popular (by # of replies), most voted
- Be able to see number of downvotes as well as upvotes
But first, we’ve got to get rid of this disgusting YT/Google+ integration. You can help the effort by signing this Change.org petition and make your voice heard. Hopefully, Google will listen and pull this terrible system for good.
