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Comment by rubberstock | Hacker News Reader

How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network?

Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment. Then they can offer an optional! integration with their other messenger apps which would allow them to compete with facebook.

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> the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit

Is is cherished? There is literally a meme that "orange envelope = who did I piss off now?". And granted there is a little bit of worthwhile content on Reddit, but it's basically the equivalent of reading Facebook at this point in time. Especially in what used to be the default subs.

3 envelopes = happy.

300 envelopes = oh shit.

Does it really matter what people on a forum think of you?

I also don't understand this, just like the decision to remove certain features over time.

Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it.

While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders.

I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment.

[0] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did...

I couldn't even manage the other day to get Google Translate to translate a YouTube page so I could read comments mostly written in cyrillic to a Russian video about the protests over there.

Perhaps I was doing something wrong (I don't think so), perhaps it's because I use Firefox and this was a gentle nudge to get me to try in Chrome, or perhaps it's just another one of Google's infuriating and perplexing 'quirks'.

Because in the current data-snowflake regulatory and legislative climate, it’s too tough to get away with monetising content sent in a ‘private’ context. Googles business model relies on being able to index and advertise to every phrase you post, but I’m sure they don’t want to run into the same issues fb has, because fb posts have an expectation of privacy. Hence google has no interest in providing a private messaging platform.

And yet they provide a private messaging platform on their mobile OS and online. Chat will be replacing hangouts, it’s where the devs from Allo went to and supports things like RCS.

YouTube with a bit more work would make an amazing social network. Like games, people tend to share/centralise their conversations around a type of media - it's why Steam & Discord are now technically popular social networks.

A proper investment in a social sharing feature centred around your friends on YouTube would be a great idea. Not only for watching together with friends but for sharing it privately (just look at how popular video is on Snapchat). They even have a stories feature already - but for YouTubers to talk to fans!

I've been using YouTube since it came out and today was the first time I've heard you could send messages.

I'm guessing it is an under-used feature and causing more harm overall than good. I'm assuming they expect folks to communicate on video comments if they want to talk about the video in question.

Everyone on HN seems to assume that Google has some sort of grand master product plan.

News at 11 : they most certainly don't, as can be ascertained by the gigantic random walk their product update strategy has been in the last few years.

Observing them from the outside, I sometimes even come to doubt their grand master business plan (I'm assuming they have one of those, which is also a doubtful proposition) is to make money.

> Has google entirely given up on getting a social network?

The problem is moderation. Youtube has enough on their hands dealing with trolls, conspiracy crap, spam, Nazis/other hate speech, propaganda, pedophiles, animal/child abusers, terrorists, copyright, ... - they don't really have the resources to deal with the inevitable sausagefests in the inboxes of women and the other hate that this feature would be used if it were more widely known.

Their obscure social networks (g+, Reader, ...) are/were niche enough to not attract too many abusers of all kind.

1) With gmail, they have the foundation for good filters.

2) Google knows the identity of almost any internet user, as shown by the new recaptcha system.

3) They don't allow banned people to recreate new accounts. At least that seems to be a problem for people who were banned from the app store.

If they link this up, they should be able to keep inboxes clean. And if this fails, they just have to offer an option to switch to a whitelist approach for people whose inbox is flooded.

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