It’s the common adage that when humankind finally pulls the plug on common sense and we all drown in rising sea water from the Arctic or choke in nuclear fallout from WW3, comments made on Google’s YouTube will stand as our civilisation’s legacy – our raison d’être, our gift to the future Earthlings that in millenia will scratch their radioactive head (be that one or two) and wonder what "dymb fuckink vidya i shit better pisses"* means.
YouTube is burgeoning full of sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, grave historical inaccuracies, and downright hate. It’s the tip of a very disgusting iceberg that showcases humanity’s most dedicated trolls, but is that about to change?
Google and YouTube are changing the way comments are shown on the video hosting website. From now on, only more relevant comments will be shown higher up the page, and posters will need to use their Google+ account to comment. Users with more of a reputable status on Google+, like celebrities, will also have their comments shown more prominently. This is all a move by Google to try and eradicate the nonsense that is the ocean of troll and moronic comments on YouTube, and it could work.
However, what I’d like to know is what algorithm they’ll be using to ‘censor’ the comments. The system will work with the worst commenters, obviously, but how do we feel letting a bot choose what we read and do not read. If the website is filtering comments so that all the nice, friendly comments get lifted to the top on perhaps a video that needs actual constructive criticism, how do we know if they are fake or not? Will uploaders now have the ability to censor comments so much that the only ones let through the gap are ones that they approve themselves wholeheartedly or give the video praise where it is not needed?
On the other hand, I believe comment s on YouTube to be absolutely pointless right now. Perhaps, once upon a time, they were a valuable currency, but now their worth has been driven down so much a lot of videos may as well just not have a comments section. By giving the uploader the abilty to filter comments, it’d be quite obvious who is just letting the praising comments through, and if a video is popular anyway, there’s no way the video uploader is going to wade through thousands of comments per hour just to check someone’s not said their voice is bad. Hmm. Maybe Vevo will employ mass teams of mods on their music videos just to make sure celebs like Miley Cyrus will only ever be positively written about on YouTube.
* From YouTube user Ryan Lenk
