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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Honestly? Unifying the commenting systems was a great idea. Having every Google application sport its own commenting system is unnecessary balkanization.

The problem is that Google+ came into that space from being a Facebook clone instead of being a comment platform. G+ should have been designed and built as a replacement for Disqus instead of a replacement for Facebook, and then it would've gone much better for Youtube/Blogger et al. For example, a Disqus-replacement would have obviously known that "Real names" was a terrible idea and the host of the comment thread (the Youtube page or whatnot) needs to have a lot of control over moderation.

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Here's an example of how YouTube comments suck: if you post a video on your google+ with a comment like "hey guys watch this", that post appears as a comment on that video's page. So now you have a bunch of comments on videos saying "Just found this cool video" or "you have to watch this"...something that makes no sense to the typical viewer.

It's even worse for the content creator. Over the last two weeks a video I put on YouTube spiked to millions of views and trying to track the comments is insane.

You get an email about activity, you see activity on the YouTube comments, you see activity through G+ notifications -- and none of it makes sense.

Did this action occur on G+? YouTube? Is this a reply to something somewhere else? What the hell is going on?

I don't mind G+ integration at all, and I think it's a good step forward, but it is simply not working well on services like YouTube at the moment and impedes use.

Also, spam control for comments is just broken. Scroll down, hover, maybe the yellow "review spam comments" box appears and maybe it doesn't. I found it interesting that G+ shares were very, very frequently marked as spam.

That perfectly shows

a) why G+ integration was a great idea, and

b) how thoroughly Google screwed up the implementation of that great idea.

If somebody comments on your Youtube post? You want to know about it. If somebody posts it to their public G+ page? You want to know about it. If somebody comments on that G+ post? You want to know about it.

Giving you a single place to drink that fire-hose of information? Great idea!

Intertwingling all those concepts together into a single mixed-up unfilterable slurry of commenting? Holy crap no wrong don't do that.

Again, my point is simply that the idea behind a unified social layer was sound. The specific decision that sharing and commenting were the same thing is obviously bone-headed.

Hmm. Facebook does it right: If you post something, comments on that post show up on your feed. If someone else shares that post, the share itself and comments on that shared post appear on the sharer's feed. No confusion, but I don't know that I'd call it a "unified social layer".

I'd still consider that a "unified social layer" in that it's still a single Facebook comment/sharing infrastructure managing the whole experience.

I think that YouTube comments have become unusable. I used to read through the comments and lol at the arguments whilst listening to music, voting various things up and down as I went. But now the comments seem to come in no order, often aren't relevant and when I've tried to vote something, the music stops and it starts taking me to another page. I've never waited to see where it's taking me mind.

Frankly...

I preferred the "balkanization"

I don't necessarily want people figured that my account X on Youtube is ran by the same person as my account Y on Blogger or account Z on G-mail or account W on whatever...

G+ is a big no-no in terms of privacy, also its usability, even if it was a clone of Disqus, is terrible, as a user I see no reason for G+ to exist at all, much less to be forced down on user throats on all google products.

I simply do not want comments I make on cat videos to be shown to my business partners. Unification - even if it is just perceived, and not actually real - is a terrible idea. The social risk is too large. End of story.

If the comments don't suck, why are people complaining about them? They suck big time. (YouTube as a whole suck too, but less.)

> Having every Google application sport its own commenting system is unnecessary balkanization.

I disagree, it depends, there are pros and cons.

> If the comments don't suck, why are people complaining about them?

This is the internet. People complain about everything, all the time. And youtube comments were the butt of jokes well before Google+ integration.

Yes, but the volume of complaints indicates that there's something wrong with the new comments. I commented recently under some video and the comment was added under some G+ post. WTF?

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