seems more like a channel status update (or whatever they call it in youtube). i see it as some kind of "what happened to the youtube we built" attitude, which seems appropriate.
I get this feeling all the time after following a link from reddit. I just hope they can deduce from the referrer that I am not actually interested in purchasing life-like male self-stimulation products.
I go one step further, and put chromium in incognito while logging in to google services. The only problem is clicking youtube links from gmail/gtalk - I have to remember to paste them in to firefox.
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.
I don't think G+ has much to do with it, more the self-moderation, but I will say the commenting on YT has improved significantly in the last few months.
That of course means we've moved from "abysmal" to "shitty" but hey, progress is progress.
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.
Or really creepy.
a- Imagine you're going to a real world bookstore. You look at the back cover of a few books and all the reviews are by your Google+ "friends". Customized for you to increase the chances you're buying it. (If ads are going everywhere and you try to ignore them, what will be left?)
b- In your holidays you're traveling to another continent. After arriving, you're surprised that you see the faces of your Facebook stalkers everywhere. Would you like that?
c- Your government rolls out new mandatory ID smartcards for both the offline and online worlds. Soon after they require everybody to sign their TCP packets with those cards. A friendly smiling illustration of a computer asks you to swipe your card to login to your OS. Have a safe journey online!
b - That would be awesome (since I assume you mean the beter direct analogy, which would be that any of my Facebook friend's statements about being there are visible. Now I know who to chat with about restaurants, sights, etc.)
c - Can you say strawman? Making up a dystopian future and placing it alongside something you don't like doesn't make the thing you don't like any more like it.
Youtube comments are universally derided as trash. This might make it better. It might also simply stop a lot of comments. And in fact, probably both.
I was recently reading reviews online before booking a hotel in Maui. I was on TripAdvisor and I guess I was also logged in to Facebook at the time, and TripAdvisor highlighted one of my friends had reviewed a hotel in Maui. Turns out Tina liked a hotel that was on my shortlist, and her review was absolutely the factor that made me book that hotel. Thanks Tina!
(As it happens, I booked it via Hotwire where you theoretically don't know the exactly hotel you're getting until you pay. With a little searching you can normally work out which hotel it is, based on the area and facilities of the hotel.)
Personally that would be a big negative for me. I like to go to different places than my friends. Yes it's irrational, but I find it boring talking about something we both know; "Did you stay at the.. oh yeh, of course you did. The view from the bar was... oh yeh you know that too"
Well then now you know Tina has been there and you can go somewhere else, no? it's not like you are forced to book the same hotel because you saw her review
a - Not sure what's creepy about this. Seeing legit reviews from people I actually know, or at least bothered to add to a social service, would likely be more useful to me than J Random Reviewer. Also, back-of-book reviews are trying to sell you the book - no kidding. Are we supposed to consider that a sinister intent?
b - I don't understand. If someone is an unwanted 'stalker' to me, they aren't likely going to be a facebook friend. Even if they were, I think I'll be OK seeing their faces 'everywhere'.. seeing as how I can distinguish fairly well between image and reality.
c - So governments will not only manage to make Mandatory World ID happen, they'll be somehow forcing people to "sign their TCP packets" with them? If that's not intended to be a wildly exaggerated parody, you really may need to loosen the tinfoil wrapped around your head up a bit.
Just to add to your point a, I'm often less interested in what a friend thinks about a book, and more interested in what another author thinks. Depending on who the review is by, it helps me understand the character of the book. If I'm unfamiliar with the reviewer, I might look into who the reviewer is and read their books. Dumbing this down into "my college roommate clicked like on this, so I'll like it too" degrades the entire experience for me.
Then I suppose you will be happy about this youtube change if it helps Google show you an author's comments? Perhaps because you +1'd them on google plus? Or because you bought one of their books?
This change, like it or don't like it, should not be conflated with, "Now Google will only show my comments from my friends." For better or worse, it means Google will know more about connections between people and the things they like. There are plusses (beyond seeing my friends' comments) and minuses to that.
The overlap between people who enjoy the same videos as me and people I trust enough to them tell my real name is almost non-existent.
And I'm not sure I'm the only one thinking that way. If I want to talk about a video, I can, you know, share it (I can even share it on Google+, that way Google loses nothing). If it turns out to be a really cool video, I'll even maybe get to impress my friends that way.
You're not alone. I don't quite understand the war against anonymity on the internet. Seeing someone's real name and photo next to a comment doesn't make what they say or do on the net any more civil.
"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.)
I was going to complain about the impossibility of being intimately acquainted with hundreds of people enough to call them friend only to find out my dictionary had a new definition for friend:
> "a contact associated with a social networking website"
"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."
I've never spontaneously seen a comment on Youtube from someone I know, as far as I can recall. However, it's really, really common to have friends of mine on Facebook share the same thing. This happens even for friends of mine that don't know or interact with each other. I think to avoid a fair amount of overlap you'd have to be very careful about adding only friends with orthogonal tastes...
One of the reasons that things like politics are getting so polarized is that's it's really easy to fall into the "bizarre homogenous bubble", and that's where most people stay, online.
I share videos with my friends and family, and seeing their comments at the top of the list of comments on those videos would be great.
Also, I could probably list 1,000 videos that most of us have seen. Never Going to Give You Up. Gangnam Style. The list goes on and on.
And then there's professionally. I know hundreds of people from former and current jobs who tend to be interested in the same work-related videos. Programming languages, stuff related to our domain, technologies we could use, etc.
I think you missed my point that you can only see comments that are made. Unless your friends and families have a grossly atypical comment rate, you're still not going to see very many things very often. It is well known that forums designed for interaction still have a terrible poster/lurker ratio, the internet at large is far worse.
But if you Share with a Community, and the people comment on the video, it would work.
Insert clever emoticon which indicates shrugging.
I'm frankly stunned to see people complaining about the death of the previous YouTube comment system. Remember that one insightful, helpful, or funny YouTube comment that you saw that one time? Me, either.
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.
I think the goal is ultimately more targeted advertising. In a way this is helpful. It would be great for adult advertising to stop showing up on cartoon videos.
Google has claimed right from the beginning that they want G+ to be a "social layer" across all of their services, which could also be seen as a "social network", but not in the same way Facebook is a "social network.
To be fair, I think they shifted their messaging a little bit (vis-a-vis whether G+ was intended as a FB-style destination network or a social layer that happens to have a stream) to take advantage of the initial burst of interest/success in the actual social-network-stream part of Google+. But yea, there are plenty of people who are too stupid/disingenuous to understand the "social layer" concept they're going for even in cases where it's very straightforward.
Tangentially related, my experience with the YouTube/Google plus social network merge has been pretty awful. I opted-out initially to integrate with Google plus, I couldn't have cared less so I just stuck with my original username/account. It seems even though I opted out, Google created a Google plus YouTube profile for me anyway and now chooses to nag me about it every time I go there. I have to pick every time I go to YouTube which 'profile' I want to use (defaulted to Google plus social network) even though I never wanted this new profile, and I have a big banner telling me I am using YouTube as profile 'x' permanently stuck at the top just to rub it in.
This annoyed me enough that a couple of weeks ago I gave up and tried to integrate it into their social network so I could just have 1 profile. Now it appears I no longer have the option to merge my original profile into Google plus, it just isn't there on the account settings. Because I made one decision to opt-out of their social network it seems I will permanently have 2 profiles from this time forward, the Google plus one has none of my history, subscriptions, likes etc it is a completely useless account.
I have a Google account but without G+ and a YT account that was linked to the Google account. The solution for getting rid of the repeated popups asking you to turn your YT account into a G+ account seems to be to delete your YT channel. That way you will only be logged in with your normal Google account. Of course, you still won't be able to comment (or operate a channel), but at least the popup seems to be gone.
It's funny I used to get that screen to turn it into a plus account but I got annoyed with it and opted out, I guess I didn't appreciate it was a one time option. All I get now is a plain profile picker (which as I say defaults to the social network profile, I have accidentally used it several times liking videos etc and then realising I was in the wrong profile). All things being considered this is only a trivial annoyance, I am just surprised at how bad the UX is for me now.
... yeah, I guess the lesson for Google to learn is to just rip off the bandage and accept the pain, because all their "courtesy" has done is prolong things.
"We're migrating to google accounts. Your YouTube account is disabled until you connect it to a google accounts and then we're going to migrate over and destroy your YouTube account. You can have more than one google account if you really want to keep your YouTube stuff disconnected from your main Google Account. Here's how to make that second Google Account and how to manage it".
Boom, done. Bolt a way to have a "casual social-networking alias" for public stuff you don't want publicly linked to your Google account so you can pseudonymously comment on YouTube and Play Store and whatever.
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.)
> hold more people accountable for their comments (w/ their reputation)
This belief has been thoroughly debunked by Facebook comments. There's absolutely no reason to believe that Google+ will be any better, particularly since the ghost-town nature of G+ means people will rightly assume they can flame away and nobody they know will ever see it.
That's true-- although just based on my observations it feels like Facebook comments on popular posts are silly because of how angry/polarized they are, not necessarily how nonsensical they are (relative to Youtube's comments historically).
For example: typical bad Facebook comment = angry rant at Sean Parker from person who seems genuinely angry
vs
typical bad Youtube comment = some nonsense troll/needlessly racist comment.
Perhaps, although I've seen an awful lot of trollish/bigoted Facebook public comments on anything related to politics — it's not as bad as YouTube but increasingly close.
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.
Buzz was actually a nice bare-minimum functionality of social networking - lite Twitter. Plus is Google trying to consolidate some monstrosity of everythign Google Social into one space.
Buzz was fine, if ugly. The only real problem with Buzz was how they leaked private GMail information.
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?
Yes, there has always been people complaining in forums. I've seen steps to recover some of the lost stuff, but I no longer bother. My original account predates the Google acquisition and I lost everything when they made the username -> Google Account transition years ago.
Probably my fault because I always decline these things until Google forces the integration upon us anyway.
This same exact thing happened to me as well (same scenario, kept declining until I woke up to find that google merged my accounts without me accepting) last week. Although I magically got my lists back after a few days, it still pisses me off that google forced the transition on me.
Could be a bug that was fixed but that was the first thing I tried and it didn't work. Even now I get buggy behavior with things like preferences. I set as many things to private as possible after the merge in addition to my language (don't live in the US). Yet I occasionally get popups asking if I want a new subscription to be shared publically or made private. And I get told that my lang has been set to English for me even though I live in Japan which I'm well aware of cause I set it myself already.
Myself, having already been thru a Google domain account merge fiasco, when confronted with the gaccount merge at YouTube just created a new useless account.
I had a good discussion somewhere here about names in relation to medical records. What it boiled down to was that one can never assume that someone has a name that stays the same, is of any set length, has any set format, and restriction on length, number of words, capitalisation etc. These facts cause havoc in unprepared systems (read as every system I have ever used). The fact that Google tries to pin this problem down is laughable - but I guess they have as good or better chance than anyone else at getting it right. <glares at GE, Philips, Kodak, Intellirad>
Same here, I declined and got "virtually killed", no more playlist etc. Another short story. helped someone unknown become really famous. Got a DMCA takedown notice on all my videos, that's the "thank you". The best part is that the file I uploaded had no license, nothing. As said that artist was completely unknown. I thought about fighting back, then just said.. f* off.. I'll wipe and shut this account down. Not worth it.. She had barely 100visitors or less in total for years, had to delete her vids with some hundred million visits..
Turns out she was completely wrong about having lost her data, the UI was just confusing in such a way that she thought she had. Don't get me wrong, that kind of confusing UI is very much Google's Problem, but "confusing UI" and "lost all my videos" are _very_ different in magnitude.
Yep, totally happened to me. Lost 100+ subscriptions. Had to find and re-add everything I follow by hand.
Also, had a fun bug recently with the G+ Page/Profile bullshit where I deleted my Youtube Channel account so it would stop asking about G+ integration at the cost of no longer being able to post videos or comments. (However, jokes on me, as they just forcibly integrated my G+ with Youtube ONE WEEK after I explicitly deleted my Channel account to prevent exactly that from happening. Thanks, Google.) It didn't erase all of my subscriptions, but it made them all nonfunctional. My feed was completely empty despite the channels having many new videos, so I had to drop and re-add all of my subs to fix the feed.
I take solace in the fact that this most recent forced integration and re-purposing of G+ posts has been an unmitigated disaster.
It's very entertaining to see videos a few years old just FULL of G+ Posts, not Youtube Comments, from people who don't even realize those posts were public years ago. And now they're getting tons of attention of G+ posts through the Youtube website from mean and vicious Youtube commenters.
It's basically the exact opposite of what Google used to stand for online, with regards to privacy, safety and respect for users.
Yep, YouTube accounts are used in the apps shipped with smart TVs. Move to Google+ made it pretty much impossible to populate the playlists in a computer/phone to watch it later on a Vizio TV app. The app doesn't accept Google+ logins, and the data under YouTube login (playlists, subscriptions, watch it later) has been wiped out.
Never happened to me either, but I don't have a G+ account with the Google account I use for YouTube and have said "no" every time they have suggested I change to a real name or when they suggested some other change.
Most people seem to hit trouble when they have a G+ account or have accepted any of the changes that Google suggests. Which is really lousy user experience and Google should really know better.
So far, keeping out of G+ has kept things usable for me on Google. I am heavily dependent on Gmail, consume a lot of content on YouTube and use Keep extensively. There is a different G+ account that I use for Hangouts for work.
But I don't see things getting better from hereon. In fact, I fully expect Google to mess this up even more and I am saying that as a fan of the company. That's the day I'll pack up and leave. It has been a good 10-year run, and all good things have to come to an end someday!
What are the issues? I've been considering getting a Nexus 5, but I don't use any Google services (perhaps besides the Google Play store). Will it be a brick?
oh yeah kdot, please tell us about it. I was also going to buy my first smartphone and thought it should be a nexus, because google updates them more often and I could more easily find hacked firmware.
I don't understand, why would it be a brick? Using an Android without Google's services is totally fine. For each Google service or app, there are plenty of alternatives available.
The only pain point you can have is if you refuse to use Google Play for installing apps. Well, Android allows you to install apps from third-party app stores or websites (e.g. Amazon's App Store), but most devs are on Google Play.
I'm a heavy Google services user, however I'm using lately K-9 Mail instead of the GMail client, because K-9 does encryption. I'm also using OsmAnd+ in addition to Google's Maps. I don't even have Google+ installed (though I do have a Google+ enabled account).
I think you misunderstood. They didn't buy it _for_ Google+, they're suggesting that without a Google+ account the experience on a Nexus 5 is so bad that they wish they hadn't bought it.
Is this not the case with all three big players in the smartphone market? I don't have an iphone but my ipod sure seems useless without an account with Apple. It's the same account I use for itunes, apps on my macbook pro, and their developer network. I presume MSFT has a similar situation with a live account. People are just upset because their Google account happens to have some social features to it. I've personally never seen anything force me to post anything on G+, it just sort of comes with my gmail account. It's completely non-intrusive. The fact that it's associated with a social network I don't use is inconsequential. It's also associated with their news and finance products which I don't use. The only nuisance that has ever come up is when some app wants to authenticate with google it wants to know all about my circles or whatever. This is pretty much the exact same behavior as what comes with facebook authentication except with G+ circles I can tell it not to share all my circles.
> People are just upset because their Google account happens to have some social features to it.
And that isn't worrying to you? People can add you to their G+ circles and there's no way to stay hidden. So Google gets to collect all the information about people you associate with in order to sell your personal info better (to the NSA, among others)
If it worried me particularly I'd simply not have a Google device. If a distrust in a G+ account was enough to put me off then letting their code handle my phone and tablet in general would be a no-no for me too.
I'm under no illusions that there is much I can do to stop Google tracking me, occasionally pushing stuff at me addverts and so forth), and trying to "lock me in" where possible, as I use my stock Android devices. I'm sure both MS and Apple either d the same sort of thing or will as soon as opportunity presents itself.
I'm not saying it is right of course, just that if it is a particular problem for you then it should inform your decisions before buying a device. Also I suspect buying and returning devices as a form of protest is not seen the same on relevant internal reports, and is likely to inconvenience your retailer more than the manufacturer, so if you wish to protest the behaviour you will find simply not buying to be more effective.
I honestly do not know what Nexus 5 feature or functionality wouldn't work without a Google+ account, and that's from someone that bought the phone on release day.
"The most hated social product in the entire Internet" is a pretty big claim. I personally have never had a single problem with G+, though I've had plenty of issues with Facebook.
My YouTube and G+ accounts merged just fine, and I've never lost a playlist, favorite, submission, comment, or anything else.
I'll add to the claim, but note that I dislike Facebook and LinkedIn more. I don't use G+ or Facebook. Way too many services try to force you to login via Facebook and make username/password login hard to find and use. This isn't Facebook's fault, however I'm sure that they like this and encourage it. LinkedIn is a mega spammer and earns runner up spot in the dislike charts from me for this. The pressure to use G+ comes from Google alone in my experience, so it's predictable when the messages will come, so they only make 3rd spot.
I made playr.me. Make your playlists, rearrange them, bookmark them, share them. Haven't worked on it for a few months mostly because I'm happy with what it does... although I will fix a few minor bugs and add a couple of features soon.
My account just disappeared one day, I was getting some error page that I am not eligible to make an account, didn't even do anything just watched videos. Everything is gone and now I am tied to G+. I don't like Google anymore but I never cared for their products to begin with. Gmail is the only thing I use, maybe its time for me to find something else.
> 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.
Maybe a little offtopic: I have multiple GMail accounts that I use. Now (since maybe 2 weeks?) after logging out and trying to log in with a different acc I get a 'account chooser' dialog where I can only select accounts I have linked to my person. To get the 'enter email / password' prompt I have to turn on private browsing or delete all cookies.
Maybe someone from Google reads this: Please add a small link (or a different easy to access way) to completely log out. There are accounts that I don't want to link together. (Hint: Google Apps for Business)
Yeah that's frustrating. I worked around it by using Chrome profiles. I have a personal profile and a work profile and they are each logged into the respective accounts. In truth, I actually really like it and would continue to do so even if Google fixed that PITA linking thing.
I lost my entire YouTube account that I had for three years and got it replaced with a Google+ account. No favorites, likes are gone, playlists have been removed, and my videos are now on a separate channel that's linked to my Gmail. So when somebody searches my username, they won't be able to find anything.
Seriously, Google, if you're going to make shitty changes to the second-largest website in the world, at the least make sure user data is preserved.
My thoughts as well. If you're going to sell out, you should fully anticipate that "the man" will just gut your company & let it bleed out. Maybe they bought it to kill it off, etc.
Basically. I like Vimeo better than youtube but it doesn't seem to get used as much.
The front page of vimeo isn't as good though. It tells you about vimeo itself rather than giving you a large search bar and a bunch of content like youtube does.
Yeah you are right on about that. I always wondered why they aren't more friendly to their own content for nonusers because they're very friendly to discovery when you're logged in.
I think it doesn't get used as much though because they will pull content if you're just posting videos of your friend doing cartwheels or something. There is a higher barrier to entry but they also only want very high quality HD or serious commercial or educational content.
I wonder whether they aren't more forward about discovery to save on bandwidth money.
Vimeo is nice on the web, but they're garbage at mobile. YouTube has an excellent mobile app on both major mobile platforms and is supported on popular TV additions like AppleTV/Chromecast.
Really? In my opinion the Vimeo Android app is abysmal. The design isn't responsive at all, it looks third party and unprofessional. To be fair, it's much better on iOS - but still outclassed by YouTube.
Oh I actually haven't looked at the app, I was just talking about embedded video. I'm sure you're right about that, Android clients tend to lag way behind.
Vimeo is not a Youtube alternative. Vimeo is to Youtube what Hacker News is to reddit. Vimeo is a nice video platform for creative projects, they do not allow a large amount of the content that Youtube does (no gaming videos, no dumb cat videos) and so it's not really suitable to replace Youtube.
There are other alternatives though, dailymotion.com is fairly popular and will accept anything.
I'm not sure you can have both high quality content and a zero barrier to entry. I actually think YT does an okay job surfacing some decent content for folks on the homepage, especially when you're logged in. I seem to anecdotally find the "related" sidebar more useful in recent times as well.
Vimeo is terrible, very anti gamer, to.the point they ban developers that put trailer videos on their service. I am personally very happy that YouTube now match Vimeo quality and happily hosts my trailers for me.
According to Vimeo's guidelines, you just can't upload gameplay videos. It says specifically you can upload first party videos but need to mark them to avoid deletion. With the huge community of video gamers on YouTube, I don't even get why you'd want to put that video on Vimeo.
When gameplay got forbidden, there was no such guideline, and YouTube did not supported HD, so Vimeo was popular for trailers, but their anti game stance drove everyone away, including first parties.
Someone has. They're called the content creators. For some reason Youtube has gone to war with the people who make it a good place to go, people who've worked for years building their channel's reputation, content and style. Now youtube are systematically pulling it all down, real name coment issue aside.
DailyMotion (and tons of others) is one but really it was a timing thing, YouTube hit at the right time regarding media and another technological advancement at the time, flash video.
Before Flash video, before html5 video, video was very difficult on the web to make work, the small yet pretty good codecs that the flash player video had were revolutionary at the time (Back in Macromedia days). Flash compression was always one of the best even though it was mostly software, still swf files are compressed/streamed in a very compact way.
Those specifically timed events won't happen again the same way, Youtube was born at the cusp of social media and the technology that made video economical enough. Youtube wouldn't be known as it is without that Flash video moment in history.
Let me rephrase "google is afraid of facebook" because it obviously leads to a lot of falses.
Google would like to keep the marketing money that goes to Facebook back at Google.
True, I believe that it is a simple reasoning: more people on Google+ leads to the better targeting for a wider audience, so better ads and more revenue. The social interaction is just another channel of information.
As you said, why is it so strange? It makes a lot of sense from a marketing point of view (the business strategy dictates so) and an engineering point of view (they already have a commenting system for users).
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 people (all my videos are unlisted). Vimeo takes ~40 minutes to encode, whereas YouTube is a lot faster meaning it's far more convenient.
Checking out my Google account, it seems I have Chrome on here. I'm outraged as I never signed in with Google on Chrome. I always clicked "Not Now". What does "Not Now" even mean? Where's the "Never" option?
This is why I hate Google. I probably made the mistake of signing into my YouTube account on Chrome which has been infected with Google+ and that leaked through to Chrome. Apparently that means my bookmarks can be stored without my permission.
The best way is to deal with this issue is to delete my Google Account. Unfortunately, that's very problematic and I've been spending the last few months trying to move to other services. I'm slowly migrating my mail (admittedly to Google Apps but I'll be switching to a different provider soon), once I'm done I'll nuke the account.
That's along with Google Docs/Drive. BitTorrent Sync actually works very well as an alternative.
I can't wait till I get to hit delete on this account. Good fucking riddance.
I completely avoided myspace, facebook, and twitter, only to be bitten by google. I started out just using gmail, then Picasa came along. Google didn't really have social overtones at the time, so it seemed safe. Then google music seemed interesting for awhile... and along came G+ to invade everything. So far I've managed to backup and delete everything except for the gmail account. From now on, I'll host and/or build my own apps.
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.
At least for me, clicking on my icon at the top right and choosing 'Switch account' allows me to choose my Youtube identity. Just in case others are having this issue.
Not sure I really believe your Chrome story, but I'm not really going to argue about it either.
I only use Chrome for testing and when asked if I'd like to sign in, I always hit no. Somehow 14 bookmarks made their way to my account. I've disabled sync now.
I had to keep on telling YouTube "no" for a long time that I didn't want to flip my YouTube account into a Google account, and then demanded I explain why.
It's gotten better recently. On my first connect to YouTube after signing in, it asks if I want to use my YouTube account or my Google account, and then it never asks again as long as my Google session doesn't time out.
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.
You're making a very basic logical error. Youtube comments on the whole may be horrible, but that doesn't discount the possibility (in fact, I'd say certainty) that some youtube comments could be good, even valuable. There are many channels on youtube where the comments are fairly high quality, even by HN standards.
The downside is that the people who put in the effort to nurture high quality comments on their channels, and the people who have been high quality commenters on youtube are the most negatively impacted by these changes. And the negative impact on the highest quality of comments might end up reducing the average quality much more than any moderate impact on the volume of the lower quality comments.
So in order to preserve a small minority who have somehow carved out a working system (which I'll assume exist despite never seeing them) in the overwhelming onslaught of vitriol and crap, we just have to deal with said vitriol and crap continue as is?
This also assumes that Google+ comments will kill off these high quality comment channels. I am sure it is true for some, but it is hardly the absolute death knell for quality conversation to require a Google+ account.
So in order to preserve a small minority who have somehow carved out a working system (which I'll assume exist despite never seeing them) in the overwhelming onslaught of vitriol and crap, we just have to deal with said vitriol and crap continue as is?
No, but beware of falling into the politician's syllogism.
False dichotomy. I'm arguing that google should have figure out a better way to add better functionality to the youtube commenting system than just shoving google+ down everyone's throats.
Google actually has something like 7+ different comment systems. And yet for some reason they felt compelled to cram youtube's square peg into google+'s round hole because that was the only reasonable technological solution? Because that was the only possible way to improve the situation?
Bullshit. It's because they want to prop up google+ and they want to make targeted ads easier.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadthe screenshot, just in case.
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.
That of course means we've moved from "abysmal" to "shitty" but hey, progress is progress.
Or really creepy.
a- Imagine you're going to a real world bookstore. You look at the back cover of a few books and all the reviews are by your Google+ "friends". Customized for you to increase the chances you're buying it. (If ads are going everywhere and you try to ignore them, what will be left?)
b- In your holidays you're traveling to another continent. After arriving, you're surprised that you see the faces of your Facebook stalkers everywhere. Would you like that?
c- Your government rolls out new mandatory ID smartcards for both the offline and online worlds. Soon after they require everybody to sign their TCP packets with those cards. A friendly smiling illustration of a computer asks you to swipe your card to login to your OS. Have a safe journey online!
b - That would be awesome (since I assume you mean the beter direct analogy, which would be that any of my Facebook friend's statements about being there are visible. Now I know who to chat with about restaurants, sights, etc.)
c - Can you say strawman? Making up a dystopian future and placing it alongside something you don't like doesn't make the thing you don't like any more like it.
Youtube comments are universally derided as trash. This might make it better. It might also simply stop a lot of comments. And in fact, probably both.
(As it happens, I booked it via Hotwire where you theoretically don't know the exactly hotel you're getting until you pay. With a little searching you can normally work out which hotel it is, based on the area and facilities of the hotel.)
b - I don't understand. If someone is an unwanted 'stalker' to me, they aren't likely going to be a facebook friend. Even if they were, I think I'll be OK seeing their faces 'everywhere'.. seeing as how I can distinguish fairly well between image and reality.
c - So governments will not only manage to make Mandatory World ID happen, they'll be somehow forcing people to "sign their TCP packets" with them? If that's not intended to be a wildly exaggerated parody, you really may need to loosen the tinfoil wrapped around your head up a bit.
This change, like it or don't like it, should not be conflated with, "Now Google will only show my comments from my friends." For better or worse, it means Google will know more about connections between people and the things they like. There are plusses (beyond seeing my friends' comments) and minuses to that.
And I'm not sure I'm the only one thinking that way. If I want to talk about a video, I can, you know, share it (I can even share it on Google+, that way Google loses nothing). If it turns out to be a really cool video, I'll even maybe get to impress my friends that way.
"This is a cool display technology." -John Carmack
"Here's a great link to send to skeptics about global climate change." -Al Gore
"This article is pseudo-science at best, and lies at worst." -Bill Nye
"I'm sorry, Pluto." -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Without attribution, none of those comments are remotely interesting. (They're all made up, but you get the idea.)
When I Search for things now, I see top results from previous co-workers, who have Shared things. Those results LEAP out at me.
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.)
I was going to complain about the impossibility of being intimately acquainted with hundreds of people enough to call them friend only to find out my dictionary had a new definition for friend:
> "a contact associated with a social networking website"
In which case, carry on I guess.
I've never spontaneously seen a comment on Youtube from someone I know, as far as I can recall. However, it's really, really common to have friends of mine on Facebook share the same thing. This happens even for friends of mine that don't know or interact with each other. I think to avoid a fair amount of overlap you'd have to be very careful about adding only friends with orthogonal tastes...
One of the reasons that things like politics are getting so polarized is that's it's really easy to fall into the "bizarre homogenous bubble", and that's where most people stay, online.
I share videos with my friends and family, and seeing their comments at the top of the list of comments on those videos would be great.
Also, I could probably list 1,000 videos that most of us have seen. Never Going to Give You Up. Gangnam Style. The list goes on and on.
And then there's professionally. I know hundreds of people from former and current jobs who tend to be interested in the same work-related videos. Programming languages, stuff related to our domain, technologies we could use, etc.
But if you Share with a Community, and the people comment on the video, it would work.
Insert clever emoticon which indicates shrugging.
I'm frankly stunned to see people complaining about the death of the previous YouTube comment system. Remember that one insightful, helpful, or funny YouTube comment that you saw that one time? Me, either.
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.
This annoyed me enough that a couple of weeks ago I gave up and tried to integrate it into their social network so I could just have 1 profile. Now it appears I no longer have the option to merge my original profile into Google plus, it just isn't there on the account settings. Because I made one decision to opt-out of their social network it seems I will permanently have 2 profiles from this time forward, the Google plus one has none of my history, subscriptions, likes etc it is a completely useless account.
"We're migrating to google accounts. Your YouTube account is disabled until you connect it to a google accounts and then we're going to migrate over and destroy your YouTube account. You can have more than one google account if you really want to keep your YouTube stuff disconnected from your main Google Account. Here's how to make that second Google Account and how to manage it".
Boom, done. Bolt a way to have a "casual social-networking alias" for public stuff you don't want publicly linked to your Google account so you can pseudonymously comment on YouTube and Play Store and whatever.
This belief has been thoroughly debunked by Facebook comments. There's absolutely no reason to believe that Google+ will be any better, particularly since the ghost-town nature of G+ means people will rightly assume they can flame away and nobody they know will ever see it.
For example: typical bad Facebook comment = angry rant at Sean Parker from person who seems genuinely angry
vs
typical bad Youtube comment = some nonsense troll/needlessly racist comment.
I don't have Google+ but I have a Youtube account.
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.
Buzz was fine, if ugly. The only real problem with Buzz was how they leaked private GMail information.
Probably my fault because I always decline these things until Google forces the integration upon us anyway.
Myself, having already been thru a Google domain account merge fiasco, when confronted with the gaccount merge at YouTube just created a new useless account.
its amazing that they host video by artists and yet do not allow the artists to use their artist names. all in the name of stamping out comment wars.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs
Edit: NSFW- language/curse words.
Turns out she was completely wrong about having lost her data, the UI was just confusing in such a way that she thought she had. Don't get me wrong, that kind of confusing UI is very much Google's Problem, but "confusing UI" and "lost all my videos" are _very_ different in magnitude.
Also, had a fun bug recently with the G+ Page/Profile bullshit where I deleted my Youtube Channel account so it would stop asking about G+ integration at the cost of no longer being able to post videos or comments. (However, jokes on me, as they just forcibly integrated my G+ with Youtube ONE WEEK after I explicitly deleted my Channel account to prevent exactly that from happening. Thanks, Google.) It didn't erase all of my subscriptions, but it made them all nonfunctional. My feed was completely empty despite the channels having many new videos, so I had to drop and re-add all of my subs to fix the feed.
I take solace in the fact that this most recent forced integration and re-purposing of G+ posts has been an unmitigated disaster.
It's very entertaining to see videos a few years old just FULL of G+ Posts, not Youtube Comments, from people who don't even realize those posts were public years ago. And now they're getting tons of attention of G+ posts through the Youtube website from mean and vicious Youtube commenters.
It's basically the exact opposite of what Google used to stand for online, with regards to privacy, safety and respect for users.
Most people seem to hit trouble when they have a G+ account or have accepted any of the changes that Google suggests. Which is really lousy user experience and Google should really know better.
So far, keeping out of G+ has kept things usable for me on Google. I am heavily dependent on Gmail, consume a lot of content on YouTube and use Keep extensively. There is a different G+ account that I use for Hangouts for work.
But I don't see things getting better from hereon. In fact, I fully expect Google to mess this up even more and I am saying that as a fan of the company. That's the day I'll pack up and leave. It has been a good 10-year run, and all good things have to come to an end someday!
Gotta love that lock-in.
The only pain point you can have is if you refuse to use Google Play for installing apps. Well, Android allows you to install apps from third-party app stores or websites (e.g. Amazon's App Store), but most devs are on Google Play.
I'm a heavy Google services user, however I'm using lately K-9 Mail instead of the GMail client, because K-9 does encryption. I'm also using OsmAnd+ in addition to Google's Maps. I don't even have Google+ installed (though I do have a Google+ enabled account).
And that isn't worrying to you? People can add you to their G+ circles and there's no way to stay hidden. So Google gets to collect all the information about people you associate with in order to sell your personal info better (to the NSA, among others)
I'm under no illusions that there is much I can do to stop Google tracking me, occasionally pushing stuff at me addverts and so forth), and trying to "lock me in" where possible, as I use my stock Android devices. I'm sure both MS and Apple either d the same sort of thing or will as soon as opportunity presents itself.
I'm not saying it is right of course, just that if it is a particular problem for you then it should inform your decisions before buying a device. Also I suspect buying and returning devices as a form of protest is not seen the same on relevant internal reports, and is likely to inconvenience your retailer more than the manufacturer, so if you wish to protest the behaviour you will find simply not buying to be more effective.
The only place I could think of where the integration is jarring is the photo uploading feature, but I've simply told Dropbox to do it instead.
I've read reviews saying that SMS has been integrated into Hangouts.
And if you don't like the Hangouts app for some reason, you can easily replace it with one of the many SMS apps out there.
My YouTube and G+ accounts merged just fine, and I've never lost a playlist, favorite, submission, comment, or anything else.
Maybe a little offtopic: I have multiple GMail accounts that I use. Now (since maybe 2 weeks?) after logging out and trying to log in with a different acc I get a 'account chooser' dialog where I can only select accounts I have linked to my person. To get the 'enter email / password' prompt I have to turn on private browsing or delete all cookies.
Maybe someone from Google reads this: Please add a small link (or a different easy to access way) to completely log out. There are accounts that I don't want to link together. (Hint: Google Apps for Business)
Seriously, Google, if you're going to make shitty changes to the second-largest website in the world, at the least make sure user data is preserved.
Users should maybe be more pissed at him for selling, than Google for tying Youtube to their overall Google strategy.
(Not that anybody should be pissed over such an issue. Just saying.)
Is it just that the costs of serving video require an enormous company or is it that the term youtube is basically synonymous with "internet video".
The front page of vimeo isn't as good though. It tells you about vimeo itself rather than giving you a large search bar and a bunch of content like youtube does.
I think it doesn't get used as much though because they will pull content if you're just posting videos of your friend doing cartwheels or something. There is a higher barrier to entry but they also only want very high quality HD or serious commercial or educational content.
I wonder whether they aren't more forward about discovery to save on bandwidth money.
Vimeo really needs to step up their mobile game.
There are other alternatives though, dailymotion.com is fairly popular and will accept anything.
https://vimeo.com/help/guidelines
Before Flash video, before html5 video, video was very difficult on the web to make work, the small yet pretty good codecs that the flash player video had were revolutionary at the time (Back in Macromedia days). Flash compression was always one of the best even though it was mostly software, still swf files are compressed/streamed in a very compact way.
Those specifically timed events won't happen again the same way, Youtube was born at the cusp of social media and the technology that made video economical enough. Youtube wouldn't be known as it is without that Flash video moment in history.
If they couldn't do it, it's unlikely anyone else can.
- Google wants more users in Google+
- People don't care about Google+
- This doesn't change the fact that Google is still afraid of Facebook and wants more people to use G+
- Google will try to do everything it can to drag you into this service which you won't use anyway
What's so strange about this?
-100% true
-100% false for people using Google+ (absolute percentage unknown)
-50% false
-80% true
As you said, why is it so strange? It makes a lot of sense from a marketing point of view (the business strategy dictates so) and an engineering point of view (they already have a commenting system for users).
The only reason I post on YouTube is to share small clips with people (all my videos are unlisted). Vimeo takes ~40 minutes to encode, whereas YouTube is a lot faster meaning it's far more convenient.
Checking out my Google account, it seems I have Chrome on here. I'm outraged as I never signed in with Google on Chrome. I always clicked "Not Now". What does "Not Now" even mean? Where's the "Never" option?
This is why I hate Google. I probably made the mistake of signing into my YouTube account on Chrome which has been infected with Google+ and that leaked through to Chrome. Apparently that means my bookmarks can be stored without my permission.
The best way is to deal with this issue is to delete my Google Account. Unfortunately, that's very problematic and I've been spending the last few months trying to move to other services. I'm slowly migrating my mail (admittedly to Google Apps but I'll be switching to a different provider soon), once I'm done I'll nuke the account.
That's along with Google Docs/Drive. BitTorrent Sync actually works very well as an alternative.
I can't wait till I get to hit delete on this account. Good fucking riddance.
Rather pay and know what I'm getting than not pay and not know.
Not sure I really believe your Chrome story, but I'm not really going to argue about it either.
It's gotten better recently. On my first connect to YouTube after signing in, it asks if I want to use my YouTube account or my Google account, and then it never asks again as long as my Google session doesn't time out.
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.
The downside is that the people who put in the effort to nurture high quality comments on their channels, and the people who have been high quality commenters on youtube are the most negatively impacted by these changes. And the negative impact on the highest quality of comments might end up reducing the average quality much more than any moderate impact on the volume of the lower quality comments.
This also assumes that Google+ comments will kill off these high quality comment channels. I am sure it is true for some, but it is hardly the absolute death knell for quality conversation to require a Google+ account.
No, but beware of falling into the politician's syllogism.
Google actually has something like 7+ different comment systems. And yet for some reason they felt compelled to cram youtube's square peg into google+'s round hole because that was the only reasonable technological solution? Because that was the only possible way to improve the situation?
Bullshit. It's because they want to prop up google+ and they want to make targeted ads easier.