YouTube's Google+ Comments Currently A FAIL

CUPERTINO, CA (Hypebot) – YouTube's comments have long been one of those downsides of web communication. Google is supposedly trying to fix that by requiring Google+ logins to comment. But beyond the normal resistance to change, some users are finding that YouTube's Google+ comments are now even worse than before. It's unclear whether they simply botched things or whether their commitment to improved comments was corporate-speak for "We're going to assimilate you into Google+ whether you like it or not just like Clyde said two years ago."

Comments have long been an issue on the web since people could make comments, I assume. 10 years ago many bloggers were buying into the idea that all or almost all comments should be allowed. That led to a lot of unnecessary nastiness finding breeding ground on blogs that should have known better. Since then a variety of experiments have been conducted to improve comments with mixed results.

When YouTube first posted news about requiring Google+ accounts to comments, they claimed that it would improve the abysmal commenting scene on YouTube:

Comments you care about move to the top.

Join the conversation publicly or privately.

Better ways to moderate comments.

That sounds nice although the current move to integrate Google+ with other Google products is similar to their earlier shift to requiring Gmail accounts for all their services.

Of course there was an uproar back then too but the current response to YouTube's comment changes seems to go beyond kneejerk reactions from the "Fuck you, Google Plus" video to a protest thread on Reddit.

While many responses are similar to YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim's question, "Why the fuck do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?," other responses are revealing problems with the implementation itself.

boogie2988: PLEASE Fix Youtube and Google+

In the above video, which currently has over 760,000 views, boogie2988 says he's following other YouTube stars like "TotalBiscuit, DanNerdCubed, and even PewDiePie in completely disabling comments on youtube starting November 12th unless we have heard from youtube."

So far they're still up. Don't know if he heard from YouTube or not but what he describes in the video is a bunch of crazy stuff happening in the comments due to the Google+ integration including:

"Most read becomes most hateful comments rising to the top, Commenters who are banned being able to come back with new accounts with the same name, a situation that's so totally out of hand that moderation is impossible."

So all three of YouTube's stated benefits aren't occurring with the current version.

But do check out the video, he gets into some interesting detail about crazy stuff he's seeing including the ability to post huge documents in the comments because they don't seem to have a limit on length. Also, comments now have live links out which is already leading to a great deal of spam and links that could quite easily lead to attack sites.

Since I don't comment on YouTube posts this has only affected me with a shift from the incessantly annoying repeated question about which name I want to use to a somewhat more confusing choice of my current YouTube login or something more specific to my Google+ account. I did click on the latter the first time I got the request but whatever came back confused me enough to go back to my current YouTube login.

I couldn't tell how big an issue that might be but Devin Colewey broke down his experience which revealed an extremely poor grasp of UX from a team that supposedly "worked on this very hard for the last year."

I'd be extremely surprised if Google undid this change but, if things are as bad as people are saying, they need to act fast before the response goes even further beyond simple reluctance to change.