YouTube comment sections are, without exception, completely awful. It doesn’t matter what you’re watching — scroll down from your video of a baby orangutan cradling a basket of kittens in it’s arms and you’ll find 90% of the comments are horrifically racist and/or homophobic, arguing about something completely unrelated to the video or spam.
Well, it looks like YouTube has, at long last, decided to do something about their comment sections being the absolute butthole of the Internet. There’s some changes coming to YouTube-ville, such as…
Filters
Believe it or not, until now this didn’t exist. Now the poster of a video can set certain words to be filtered and any comments with those words will be flagged and need approval to go up. The filter will also catch intentionally misspelled naughty words. You can also ban certain users from commenting on your videos altogether.
Threaded Conversations
Yes, believe it or not, YouTube didn’t have this either. Now people can actually have conversations instead of just responded to whatever gibberish happens to be on the first couple pages of comments.
Good Comment Promoting Algorithms
Up until now, the first comments you see when you scroll down are whatever nonsense is the most recent, or whatever the assholes commenting on the video upvoted the most. Not a great system. Now YouTube is promising magical algorithms that will find good, constructive comments from people you like and promote them to the first page. Seems like something that shouldn’t actually work, but hey, YouTube is owned by Google, and Google can do anything.
So yeah, will this fix YouTube comments overnight? Of course not, but hey, it’s not like things can get much worse. What do you, the most excellent Uproxx commentariat, think of these changes?
via Gizmodo