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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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