Author: Padraig Fahy

If you have been living under a rock for the past week, YouTube has made a massive change to the site in ways that people now want to leave!

They have now implemented the Google+ commenting system (which has been trialed and tested to be a great tool)…but when YouTubers got this new feature, everyone lost their mind!

And I don’t mean a small portion…I mean, EVERYONE. From TotalBiscuit, Jonathan Paula, Boogie2988 and more, they have shared their displeasure with the new comments system that they have disabled comments on videos uploaded since the changeover.

What is so bad you may ask? Well, for starters, everyone has pretty much accepted that everyone needs to link their YouTube account with a Google+ profile or page. No one wanted to do it, but for the ‘unification’ that Google is doing, it seems logical.

While it will take away anonymity from people, that is something that people are going to have to accept. Times are changing at Google and they want everyone to be “Open and Free and something something”.

People are afraid of using Google+…That’s the way it is, people are using Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and thus they don’t want to use anything else. But something has occurred to me while writing this piece which may be true….

Google would like people to try Google+ before dismissing it. Most people who have complained about the new system have never touched Google+ and Google would like those people to actually try out the service. Now you may be asking “Why would they do this? Why are they trying to force us to use it?”

YouTube is owned by Google. Google can do whatever they want. It is their site and they have the rights to make this change. They obviously didn’t think this on a whim and say “Let’s implement it right now”…No. They took their time with this system. They announced  this system a long time ago and they were confident in their system.

YouTube under-estimated what the community is capable of. They thought that YouTube was this place of awesome community discussions relating to the video and thus they wanted to centralise the whole “Community discussion”, but they never thought of the side effects from this.

Unlimited character length. Who thought that would be a good move? Yes, it allows you to talk about the discussion on hand, but it also makes way for people to copy and paste movie scripts, books, and even ASCII penises and swastika’s.

And also…External linking…Anything from viruses to screamers and…porn.

While the system of Google+ comments on YouTube works, the content of which doesn’t and YouTube needs to fix that. I know what people may be thinking at this point. Changing the system back to the old YouTube commenting system. No. That is not how you fix stuff. If that was the way of doing things, then we would have the same version of YouTube that we had in 2005/6 and no real innovation from anyone and thus hold everything back from ever developing.

So, YouTube will have to sit down and actually fix these issues I just talked about. Because at the moment, Big YouTubers such as TotalBiscuit and Boogie2988’s career is on thin ice. They could lose their job because of this.

I think Boogie’s video sums it up well. I have done enough of talking about it.

Great system…badly implemented!