Now there has been a lot of discussion about the recent replacement of YouTube's old comments system with the Google+ comments system. While I agree with several points:
- The manual spam review UI looks well broken.
- The fact that there's no way to view all comments on your channel, except for manually setting up a Gmail filter to nicely group all comment notifications into a separate label, a kludgy and inferior solution.
These are all backwards steps, the hallmarks of a rushed release, and it's ridiculous and unnecessary, and it's valid to get angry. The things on the list above, though, look fixable, the first is a bug, and the second seems like a indefensible situation, etc.
However, what really concerns me is some of the sheer tin-foil hat paranoia that accompanies these complaints. This is leveled at Fran's video, but a good deal of the rhetoric leaks into Dave's as well. Let me (not word-for-word) quote some directly incorrect statements:
- Fran: "I use Mozilla, so I can't use Google+." Absurd.
- Fran: "What sort of reacharound are you willing to accept when doing something stupid like making a comment on a video, while Google is going into your computer to get whatever it wants?" Um, if you log into Google+ to make a comment on a video, the only thing added to the "tracking net" is that comment. Where's the tin-foil hat?
- Fran: Quoting from an article, "Google is cross-leveraging Search, Gmail, Maps, Android and everything else, [+YouTube] tying them together with Google+". Can you name a service on that list that wasn't logged into using a Google account before.
Dave shadowed the last point in his video too, and it's a particularly perplexing. We were all using Google accounts before this change. A Google+ identity is just a tag within your Google account, a location on the Google+ site, yet another profile page. A pass to use Google+, the social networking site. Where does this magical new ability for Google to track you come from? It was all Google before, it's still all Google now. What is everyone getting so hysterical about? You realise Google bought YouTube back in 2006, about a year after it was created, right?
At the end of the day, you type things into your computer, it goes out to the Internet. A fair lot of it lands in Google property. They use it to customise advertising to make it as relevant as possible to you. Call it tracking if you want, and yes, it makes them a lot of money. But they only make money by showing advertisements that are relevant to the users, the advertisers' wouldn't pay if no sales ever came from the advertising. But we're talking about a site here that lets you upload multi-gigabyte video files, and serves them with outstanding reliability and speed to anyone who's willing to watch. One would have to be a monumental, spoiled and unreasonable idiot to think that it's reasonable to get this for free. Analysts estimate bandwidth costs alone for YouTube run into $360 million per year. So yes, there will be advertising. And I'd rather have a small amount of likely-to-be-of-interest-to-me, high-cost-per-click-to-the-advertiser, well-targeted advertising than pages and pages of penis-enlargment pill advertisements. Any other point of view is perplexing to me.
Dave, why do you want to uncheck the "post to Google+" box when you post a comment? If you don't want to visit/spend time tending your Google+ page, that's perfectly reasonable, but what negative consequence befalls you if you failed to untick that box? Any replies made on your Google+ page also find their way into the YouTube comments stream; they're one and the same, that, if anything, is the whole point of this revamp. There's going to be a tiny percentage of your users who actually use Google+, who would prefer that you leave it on; the rest are utterly unaffected.
I would go on but this is all I'm calling for here -- a bit less hysteria and a little bit more well-founded, thought out argument. These videos seem to be a fascinating mix of perplexing hysteria and very validly pointed out annoying bugs. I heartily encourage the latter, but find the former absurd. If I'm wrong, or if I've missed some specific point, please correct me.