Is is cherished? There is literally a meme that "orange envelope = who did I piss off now?". And granted there is a little bit of worthwhile content on Reddit, but it's basically the equivalent of reading Facebook at this point in time. Especially in what used to be the default subs.
300 envelopes = oh shit.
Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it.
While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders.
I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment.
[0] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did...
Perhaps I was doing something wrong (I don't think so), perhaps it's because I use Firefox and this was a gentle nudge to get me to try in Chrome, or perhaps it's just another one of Google's infuriating and perplexing 'quirks'.
A proper investment in a social sharing feature centred around your friends on YouTube would be a great idea. Not only for watching together with friends but for sharing it privately (just look at how popular video is on Snapchat). They even have a stories feature already - but for YouTubers to talk to fans!
I'm guessing it is an under-used feature and causing more harm overall than good. I'm assuming they expect folks to communicate on video comments if they want to talk about the video in question.
News at 11 : they most certainly don't, as can be ascertained by the gigantic random walk their product update strategy has been in the last few years.
Observing them from the outside, I sometimes even come to doubt their grand master business plan (I'm assuming they have one of those, which is also a doubtful proposition) is to make money.
The problem is moderation. Youtube has enough on their hands dealing with trolls, conspiracy crap, spam, Nazis/other hate speech, propaganda, pedophiles, animal/child abusers, terrorists, copyright, ... - they don't really have the resources to deal with the inevitable sausagefests in the inboxes of women and the other hate that this feature would be used if it were more widely known.
Their obscure social networks (g+, Reader, ...) are/were niche enough to not attract too many abusers of all kind.
2) Google knows the identity of almost any internet user, as shown by the new recaptcha system.
3) They don't allow banned people to recreate new accounts. At least that seems to be a problem for people who were banned from the app store.
If they link this up, they should be able to keep inboxes clean. And if this fails, they just have to offer an option to switch to a whitelist approach for people whose inbox is flooded.
Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment. Then they can offer an optional! integration with their other messenger apps which would allow them to compete with facebook.