<videovortex> youtube 'upgrades' its comments

[Rainer Hillrichs]

Dear all,

Well, YouTube has always been a commercial enterprise and not a community
medium or a forum for free speech. The founders and later Google understood
that money followed users, and that community and voice were very popular
catch phrases for regular users, journalists, and scholars in the 2000s.
The rhetoric and its positive reception helped making YouTube big. However,
there was a commercial drive behind it from the very beginning. These guys
were early PayPal professionals after all. The lecture of Jawed Karim from
October 2006 is also interesting in this regard. Enabling voice in comments
and elsewhere is only in YouTube Inc's interest as long its in their...
interest.

The antichronological list of comments made sense but it did not consider
relevance in terms of authorship, popularity of a comment, and the
relationships between comments. There's a point. Let's see how this works
out in practice.

To me this update seems to be pretty complex. Probably too complex for
users to understand and to use properly. This has been kind of
characteristic for other Google products lately: Minimalism and pure
functionality are gone. I'm getting confused by the new Google Mail myself.

Facebook has these two options for how posts from others are displayed: Top
Stories and Most Recent. That might be an option to have two ways of
displaying comments for viewers to choose from.

 I'm pretty sure that between comments that were actually posted ads will
appear from which Google's algorithms think that they are related to the
video, like "Suggested Posts" on Facebook. But then, this wouldn't be
YouTube selling out or something. It would just be consistent with the
advertisement-funded logic of the platform.

Yours,
Rainer

Rainer Hilrichs
University of Bonn
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~hillrich/







On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> http://mashable.com/2013/09/24/youtube-comments-upgrade/
>
> (not sure if this is good or bad news… geert)
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