Re-shares are not good reading. They are written by users for their followers, not for the people on the actual video page. As you said, they have zero value.
When I first noticed this way back when Google started publishing re-share comments under the videos, I would reply to those comments with remarks such as "I already knew that; yes I know what the video is; why are you repeating the video name"... and some people responded with "what are you talking about" because they didn't even know their re-share comments were being published on the video page. That's how broken the comments are.
YT comments should have been hauled out and shot. Not jackboot-forced onto other platforms as well.
Looks like the latest comments are from Feb 2015, sad that it's not still live.
Not a terrible quality snapshot though.
Sometimes I think that's a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki
Disaggregate content from commentary. That's the internet I want.
Facebook has the same problem. Any reasonably popular feed, such as I f'ing love science has completely worthless comments, because 99% are them just people tagging their friends.
You see Google+ interaction where you expect simple comments. I often see Youtube comments in Google+ threads because the thread happened to start with a video, and therefore automatically becomes a Youtube comment for barely literate Youtubers to spit their bile at. Or I see a G+er accidentally post a Youtube comment as a nonsensical G+ post.
Google tries to treat everything the same, but they need to recognize that different things are different things. I don't want my G+ stuff on Youtube, and I don't want Youtube stuff on G+. You don't want G+ reshares in the article's comment section.
I'm glad they finally seem to be coming to their senses. Would have been nice if that'd happened a few years earlier.
To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.
Why are you even allowed to have 2 names anyway? The real one(the one in your url,.e.g. twitter.com/<realacctname>) and that $WHATEVER_STRING_YOU_WANT username?
Idea, someone make an extension/greasemonkey that replaces all the free-form usernames with the actual account name so I can follow conversations without having to deal with all the mental bookkeeping of 2 names per user in conversational thread.
1) It's fully public, and everything you're a fan of uses it.
This makes it fantastic for building a feed of stuff you follow in tiny, tidy, bite-sized messages where one overactive wall-of-text can't slow you down as you drink from the firehose of info.
2) It came out of SMS. That means it keeps the limits of SMS, like short messages and usernames and whatnot. Imho they should break out of this box a bit - move tags and people out of the message body and swap names into the UI.
4chan (well, imagboards in general) have a nice system where you can reply to multiple people at once by referring to the post id. Top-level comments are usually represented by referring to no comment, or by referring to the OP's post id. I find this much, much easier to follow.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...
I agree that having some sort of easy way to quick-view the parent of a post would also be useful.
My thought is that HTML needs a comments primitive with date, author, subject, and references, with the resulting view (threaded, flat, collapsed, etc.) a client detail.
Or, you know, Usenet, tin.
1. Usenet was small. Somewhere between 50k and 500k users, based on my own and Gene Spafford's guestimates. More solid numbers appreciated (~1988-1992 or so).
2. It was selective. You had to be a student at a research university, or work for a tech company, or have government access, or be able to gain access to systems provided by same. Which meant you were at the tail end of a highly selective filter.
3. It crumbled under the face of multiple attacks: spam, abuse, trolls, etc. There were some defenses, but ultimately insufficient.
4. It was a pain to administrer, and for little or no gain. Which meant that few providers would, those who did charged, and they recouped minimum benefit for the effort. Ultimately it fell prey to the problem of shrinking usage and ready substitutes largely via mailing lists (relatively comparable) and Web-based forums.
5. Limited rich-format support, limited permanent content support, limited collaborative effort support. A Usenet-type functionality with _some_ support for post formatting, for images, video, and audio (but not to the point of being readily abusable), and for permanent content (FAQs, Wikis, etc.) to be usefully co-related to the primary discussion, would be useful.
I don't know that we'll ever have "one" conversation platform again. And no, Facebook doesn't count.
"Classical Usenet" was what came before, for the most part.
There also tend to be fewer comments (it's easy to see who is replying to who) so threading is typically not necessary on FB.
Tumblr has very much the same program regarding reshares. Although I'm not sure if Tumblr even wants to foster discussion on their site--people do it any way, of course, quoting each other, but most Tumblr themes make these kind of discussions look awkward and hard to follow. Nested quotes get thinner and thinner, until you have just one word per line, sticking halfway out the container.
>>"Google has been doing some rethinking" thanks I already read that
>>"#googleplusupdate #youtube " thank you that was valuable
>>[another summary of the article I just read]
This is also one of my major complaints with youtube. I find it hard enough just to follow a single youtube comment thread because:
1. Everyone appears to be speaking a dialect of english that is understandable seemingly to everyone but myself - some sort of strange mixture of 90's IRC speak with some klingon thrown in.
2. People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username.
John Smith: That was a great video
> Jane Smith: +Bubba I agree
me: "who the heck is Jane talking to?"
3. Then finally there're all of those G+ reshares:
John Smith: Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/asdf83289
> John Smith's friend: I enjoyed that video
</rant>