I believe this is a sensible course of action and a natural evolution/pivot/hedge of making use of an existing social network/community to satisfy a couple goals (for Google):
- Have a general-purpose social network, but bootstrapped from a userbase where it can be welcome rather than vilified (unlike Buzz, Google+, etc.)
- Stop the slow trickle of (duplicative, cross-pollinated) traffic from the Youtube community to other platforms, because their own platform is lacking (they needed Twitter-like micro-announcements badly)
- Better arm themselves against other sites that have done video from the beginning but are expected to develop a similar direction (Twitch)
- Better arm themselves against other sites that didn't start off with video but have branched out into it (Facebook & subsidiaries, Twitter & subsidiaries, Tumblr, most other social networks these days)
Hopefully this also stops the (IMO, frankly irrational [1][2][3]) speculation that Twitter will be bought out by Google.
To add to parent, this is repurposed tech because it's part of Google+.
https://googleblog.blogspot.de/2015/11/introducing-new-googl...
I would be absolutely floored if it wasn't the same tech behind the scenes. In that sense, they've taken something that was actually working with G+ [highlighted in blog post above] and are taking a shot at leveraging that. I really like that they were able to push this internally using a 'white label' process [speculation]. In big corps everyone has the disease that their name and (internal) brand has to be on everything.
Censorship and demonetisation on YouTube seems to be happening to people fairly regularly, and without appeal, via poorly calibrated algorithms, corporate pressure and to satisfy mobs of complaining people for various reasons. The rules seem to be vague to the point of meaninglessness and it seems even the stars of the platform who often share managers and production companies with other stars have difficulty getting in touch with YouTube to resolve issues.
I think most content producers have wised up to this and diversify their audience over multiple platforms. If you rely on the income putting all your eggs in the YouTube basket is a massive risk until they clean up their processes (there are many automated and social methods to do some of this but they seem completely uninterested in doing it).
> Censorship and demonetisation on YouTube seems to be happening to people fairly regularly, and without appeal, via poorly calibrated algorithms
Demonetization happens when a video doesn't meet their "advertiser-friendly" policy, but there is an appeal process where you can have a human look at it to determine if the original assessment was wrong [0]. Do you have data to support your claim that their algorithms are "poorly calibrated"?
Can you provide some examples of "censorship"? They do have policies that things like graphic content or spam is not permitted and will be removed from the site, but I think that's reasonable.
> It seems even the stars of the platform who often share managers and production companies with other stars have difficulty getting in touch with YouTube to resolve issues.
YouTube provides email support with a 1-business day response time to all creators [1], and the bigger channels get their own Partner Managers [2].
When Pewdiepie (person on your [2] link on Silver & Up banner) complains [0] that YouTube isn't communicating enough, most people will agree that problem is at their side.
>Demonetization happens when a video doesn't meet their "advertiser-friendly" policy, but there is an appeal process where you can have a human look at it to determine if the original assessment was wrong [0]. Do you have data to support your claim that their algorithms are "poorly calibrated"?
It happens all the time when content creators are using content under fair use. Jim Sterling goes over demonetisation with ContentID [1] and latest changes [2] in his videos. I don't know if he have used that email support, but it would be fair to assume that he have tried and gave up.
> YouTube provides email support with a 1-business day response time to all creators [1], and the bigger channels get their own Partner Managers [2].
Multiple demonetized channels have stated that they have not received responses via the official support channels. It's all well and good stating a 1-business day response time, but if Youtube doesn't follow through that, where does that leave the content creators?
It's like businesses with support response SLAs that are cleared by the sending of a robo-email from their support system. No actual support has been rendered.
https://www.maxlaumeister.com/blog/google-is-deleting-your-f... has some, but anyone who's been following it knows it's happening beyond that. I am surprised that infinitesoup is apparently unaware of these issues given his account on HN is 591 days old and over it's history has posted about absolutely nothing but YouTube. Indeed an account on Reddit called infinitesoup, possibly unrelated I concede, has wall-to-wall comments on YouTube too. They all read like a superfan or possibly an employee of Google providing support. The usual etiquette on HN is to simply disclose an interest and then argue a point. While it's not against the rules I don't like having to do my own research and finding out the person posting links from Google support is likely a Google employee (the person connected with the Reddit account seems to be a Google employee, maybe this guy isn't).
Even if they are different accounts and this guy isn't a Google employee they haven't presented any other credible evidence for this wonderful support anyway. They have only presented a policy aspiration. Google is not Amazon; Google is notorious for bad customer support. Our prior belief for "will YouTube provide good support" shouldn't be very high given they are part of Google. Therefore it doesn't take many data points in the direction of poor support to confirm that.
There are clear and sometimes good reasons for what Google does, it's a great company with competent employees but let's not drink the Kool-Aid and pretend they have great customer support just because there is a policy document aspiring to have good response times.
Play store has had the same issue for years, and there really isn't an alternative either. You can try to diversify, but nothing compares to the android crowd due to low, low cost devices. Google doesn't want to pay for decent support for something making them a ton of money, why would they do it for YouTube? You're stuck. Play the game and play it well.
This looks like Google+ without the name. I always thought this is how Google+ should have been introduced. Small steps, without the hype, integrated in all Google products. Now it's too late and people will be bugged by every future attempt at social sharing / community building.
> What I really want though, is proper commenting system under videos.
I'm curious to know what you mean by that?
As far as youtube comments being the butt-end of jokes about bad comments, I think this is just due to the fact that video is the great common denominator (and thus, the intellectual filter is very very low). Reddit's r/videos is limited to "non-political" videos for much the same reasons (and given that r/politicalvideos is... well, let's say the comment quality is not consistent.
I don't really see how this can be improved: a voting system won't filter low-effort/common denominator comments if what the majority wants is low effort comments.
Or just if the mass of low effort comments is too large. And since low effort is easy to make, the mass will be large.
H3h3 on the insane number of views on 'minecraft sex' videos (which is exactly the kind of thing I mean when taking about common denominator): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3LhrbSp6Mw
And then there's the lessons of Twitch Plays Pokemon: they had to remove the ability to request multiple keypresses at once because people kept stalling (start10) for example.
another thing is that on youtube the videos often get removed because copyright owners complain/object - if that happens then all the comments also get removed. Why should one bother to comment if the comment just gets deleted like this?
as i see it: Youtube comments are not intended to be something that adds value to the video, it is supposed to be a feedback mechanism for the one who posted the video
About comment history, it seems that it existed but got removed (why, I have no idea EDIT: kevin_thibedeau makes a good point on that topic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcH9VR96Z1M
As for receiving a reply, I know that you get a notification, at least if people use your +name in their comment, but it isn't easy to manage given the lack of history, as you pointed out.
Most likely to contain flame wars. We're dealing with base level humanity on YouTube. You have to enact these sort of constraints to keep things tolerable.
I know Youtube Comments are generally the worst - but when some content creator says "Hey, leave a comment below if you have questions" - and you do leave a comment, then you've got no way of knowing whether they've replied.
It seems like they may as well just remove commenting, at that point.
If you wanted to contain flame wars, wouldn't the very first step be not to prioritize controversial comments in the ranking algorithm? (as mentioned above in this thread)
Currently, the system rather seems to encourage flame wars then to prevent them. You might not find the comment that you were planning to reply - but you'll always find some comment that you can spray fresh vitriol on.
Finally, as a constraint I find the design odd - it doesn't actually prevent you from doing anything, it just makes an arbitrary set of actions unnecessarily hard.
Except this does much less to curtail flamewars (what would not be able to find one's own old reply do for that?) than it does to curtail exchange of thoughts and growth. Also, you do get notifications for replies, though not a great overview of them. For flaming, that's fine and more than enough. It's just useless for actually discussing anything.
The comment algorithm itself is also broken. Comments that get many replies and are controversial are shown higher than those that purely get many up votes.
Hank green made a video lately about how people should reply with + to a post they like instead of up voting and the top comments on recent videos are now far far better than ever before.
I don't know if YouTube made their algorithm bad on purpose to stir controversy which would stir usage but they really need to fix it.
They could also do things like global karma that makes all your posts naturally higher or lower ranking so that people that constantly troll get buried immediately on every video instead of always enjoying attention on comments before they get down voted.
hmm has anyone tried such global karma that determines default comment ranking? IMHO it could work only if its on something like a logarithmic scale.
Else people that tend to create substantial on-point comments will get swamped with say funny or snarky one-liner producers even worse than now, as those are much easier to digest and, being devoid of opinion, much easier to upvote.
I also just find that a lot of the implementation of the comments is horrible.
For one, that it's somehow and for whatever reason linked together with Google+. Far too often, I have to read through a sea of +-syntax, which makes no sense from the YouTube-side. And when people share a YouTube-video on Google+, apparently the text with what they've shared it, shows up in the YouTube-comments. I don't need to know that jeffmeyers told +sandrasmith, +thomasthomasson and +phillipmuller to watch the video that I just watched. That's not relevant for the discussion about the video.
Then something really basic that you could reasonably expect webpages to have figured out since the early 2000s. Shortening comments properly. I don't need a comment shortened when the part that you've cut off is only 1 line. Not even if it's 5 lines. That's just annoying. But somehow Google has managed to implement the single most naive implementation of comment shortening.
Next thing is the thread-system that they have going on. I still have not figured out how the comments inside a thread are ordered. Most of the time, they seem to be chronologically ordered, but occasionally you see people replying to other people who have commented further down in the chain. That their time stamps are only as precise as the next bigger time-frame ("2 weeks ago", "6 months ago", "1 year ago") doesn't help either.
And then their tagging system. It's a naive "+username"-text in the comment text. If the user changes their user name, then good luck trying to trace it back. Also, they allow user names with spaces in them, meaning that it's often hard to figure out what's part of the user-tag and what's part of the actual comment-text. If they had a less naive tagging system with proper identifiers behind the user names, they could highlight what the user-tag is and dynamically load in the correct user name.
Proper threading and down votes introduces self regulating mechanism. It won't increase the quality on poor videos, but will help distil usefulness in niche videos.
Edit: Youtube would never do that, because reading comments distracts from watching videos which reduces ad revenue.
I don't know if you remember, but youtube used to be ordered by time of commenting and it was terrible: so many videos had 'FRIST!!1!' comments (yes, multiple of them)
My guess is that it's just impossible to regulate. Take a website that has state of the art threading, karma system and all that: reddit.
AskReddit threads sometimes get to 10k comments, it's just impossible to read through (the bottom 5k comments will never get read, much less upvoted). And people on Reddit sometimes say that their inbox "blew up" and what not when they get a 100 responses (which is a lot really).
Can you imagine youtube-level traffic? Imagine a video with 1M views (which is really not a crazy number by youtube standards): if 1% of users dislike your comment enough to reply to it, you'll get 10k responses! Even if we cut this number by 10 (assuming that 9/10 users either don't bother reading or replying to your comment), you'd still get 1k comments. Even a tenth of that feels like a large amount.
Now, also imagine people being able to read through your comment history and go on witch-hunts like people on Reddit sometimes do (and which every moderator tries to prevent), but on youtube audience scales. Oh god…
very good point re blowup. Another thing is that whatever reddit is doing, still doesn't help much to clean up comments on large lightly-moderated subs. Best quality is still a matter of having an army of moderators and tight rules there, like r/science and r/askhistorians (?is that the one? its called something like that anyhow) subs.
I'd love to have a personalized filter to hide low effort comments and posts automatically, both on YT and Reddit.
It would be doable using machine learning to assign a low effort/meme score to comments. Posts could be scored by the average time it takes users to see it. If it is a gif, image or clip under 1 minute - it's almost 100% fluff.
I like this idea, wonder how it scales! on the simple side of things, you can have something like that youtube snob browser extension, that simply hides stuff like all caps, no punctuation etc. Guess you can add more such hand-crafted features..
For something machine learning, well if it'd need to train on your preferences all the way from character-lvl to your preferences, maybe its too expensive to do it for all users.
On the other hand, if it tries to learn just a smallish matrix of general purpose features for everyone (how exactly? to predict votes? or unsupervised?), embedded in the say JSON-LD of each comment, and then just a simple shallow regression model on your history of voting conditioned on that matrix, maybe that can scale?
The answer to Patreon would be to actually care about people; they have rely on things like Patreon because to outright trust Youtube/Google alone would be suicidal to their online video career thingy. If that's the only channel you can communicate to your fans with and your only stream of revenue, you know it could be gone any second without even an answer from a human for some of the more messed up things. That's kind of all you need to know. Big youtubers might get some grease when they squeak, but for every one of those there are probably hundreds or thousands we never hear of.
Within niche areas of interest, there actually are communities between content creators. I've seen some neat collaborations. But I'd say there is no community at all in the comments.
Plus the dregs of the Google+ community. Look at the people commenting on the announcement - social media gurus, 'futurists', wannabe viral video producers...
The phrase "Youtube Community" makes me think of the sub-communities, such as the ARG communities - which use Youtube for video hosting, Patreon for funding, independent web forums (such as Unfiction) for data gathering, and apps (like Horror Amino) for community management.
Were Youtube to build feature parity to each of those sites, they might see more communities self-contained within Youtube.
Like Youtube (and just about every social website ever), size matters - bigger is better to a point of critical mass, then it's all downhill from there.
I was really hoping that, after reading the title, YouTube Community was going to be about Google crowdsourcing DMCA takedown request reviews. As in, let the community (a jury of your peers) decide if a takedown is fraudulent (I've got many, yet to receive a legitimate claim!) rather than relying on the "word" of an automated robot that only knows how to say, "take it down!".
> YouTube Community was going to be about Google crowdsourcing DMCA takedown request reviews.
Crowdsourcing would be incompatible with DMCA safe-harbor requirements (so they wouldn't be "DMCA takedown request reviews" if they were crowdsourced.)
Maybe not DMCA, but ContentID. If the algorithm finds a match, let some humans look at it before slapping ads on it and handing the money to someone else.
Filing a false, bad-faith DMCA claim is technically an act of perjury, but I've never heard of anyone convicted or even seriously threatened with this action since it is almost impossible to prove bad faith.. ESPECIALLY when algorithms are automatically doing much of the damage.
In any case, I think YouTube kinda subverts much of the DMCA provisions by having their own claim system (the whole ContentID thing) which often comes into play and causes problems (for content creators, not for people making claims of dubious authenticity) before real DMCA claims are made.
It is only perjury to claim that you are the owner or qualified to act on the behalf of the owner of the copyrighted work that you allege is being infringed upon. For instance, if you are some random person, it would be perjury to file a DMCA takedown for a legitimately infringing video on YouTube of Steamboat Willie, because you are not Disney. It is not perjury (under the wording of the DMCA) if there is a video titled "Willie and his Steamboat" which is of a child playing with a toy steam boat and does not contain any footage from the Disney video, if you legitimately are authorized by the copyright owner of Steamboat Willie (Disney).
I understand your pain, but I do believe this can be still solved with a technology, they just have to care. For instance fair use is very hard to identify accurately but it's not impossible. There is less than 0.01% cases when it can't be decide automatically (still a huge number though) and those should be reviewed by people.
YouTube's problem is that there is no interested to improve the product (content id). Technology is good enough, but the product itself sucks.
Full disclosure, I'm heavily biased as I built my company on their (and others) inefficiencies.
> I do believe this can be still solved with a technology, they just have to care. For instance fair use is very hard to identify accurately but it's not impossible. There is less than 0.01% cases when it can't be decide automatically.
Fair use is not a definition -- it is a legal doctrine. Conclusively determining whether a video is fair use not only impossible for a computer, it is impossible for people. The only way to determine whether a video falls under fair use conclusively is to conduct a Federal trial and a series of appeals.
This is a good way to kickstart a social network - integrate it deeply into a product that already has a very well established userbase.
As other commenters pointed out, this is infinitely more likely to stick than Google Plus. I've personally never felt that Google was serious about Google+. If they had been, they'd have gone for an approach like this one from the start. For instance, integrate it natively to Gmail (and of course make it individually accessible on its own domain) - it worked for Hangouts adoption.
Make it a new tab in Gmail, make it very fast and easy to switch between your email and your social feed. Many people already spend many hours in gmail, or have a tab always open anyway. Adoption would have been instant, and if they had done that in 2011, maybe it would have had a shot at dethroning Facebook.
Buzz could have been a great idea IMHO if handled properly. What got them in trouble was the underhanded way in which they 'friended' people, exposing mistresses to wives.
>As other commenters pointed out, this is infinitely more likely to stick than Google Plus. I've personally never felt that Google was serious about Google+.
Is this actually separate from G+? As someone who actively uses it daily, this definitely seems like each channel could very well just be a community in G+ Communities (which is alive and thriving already, though of course not to the extent that YouTube as a whole is), with comments potentially mirrored between YouTube and the G+ community (in the same way comments are mirrored between e.g. the comments on this post and G+ posts of this url).
Could definitely be a way to introduce different audience to G+ from a new vector.
What's G+ like these days? Used it a few years ago, only social net I gave a serious try, and was really quite fond of it.
Circles were quite a practical way of following topics of interest, w/o having to actually communicate with anyone or disclose anything about myself to anyone (as opposed to "friending" anyone on fb, which notifies the other party as if I actually wanted any interaction with them), and there was quite a lot of say tech folks in various topics to track.
But as a topical news aggregator, there are other options, such as hackernews, reddit, various planets and desktop/console rss/atom aggregators etc, so not a real gain.
Didn't stick to it mainly cuz I'm apparently too introverted for classic friend-to-friend social networking, as I suspected; didn't really have anything to say about anything, and didn't care much to hear about the daily fluff in the lives of acquaintances either.
So what kinds of concepts/services developed and thrived on G+ since google gave up on yt integration?
It's evolved a bit more mainstream-feeling, which isn't necessarily a bad thing inherently, but did away with a lot of the cool quirks that I enjoyed originally (for example, there's a couple extra clicks to actually add people to individual circles now -- whenever you click the button to add them to your circles it instead adds them to an auto-generated "Following" circle, and you have to go back in and remove/add the circles you actually want).
Much of the focus on circles was replaced with Collections (which are basically reverse-circles), which I think works a little better. You can still follow people as a whole, but you can also choose to follow any of their "collections", which basically split their posts up per-topic (e.g. I have collections in writing, programming, and pictures of my cats -- most people don't follow all three).
Also with more people joining G+, it moved further away from how I was using it as a news aggregate to more of an actual social network. I could probably get more news if I unfollowed people posting about their days, but most of the people I follow are experts in my fields and it's interesting to see what their days/problems/lives are like. There's still lots of really good, in-depth conversations in comments though, as long as you write a reasonable post to prompt them (most shares without accompanying text are just ignored).
Also, I've heard the Communities feature is huge, but it seems a bit too social (and lowest-denominator) for my tastes. If I were looking for an analogy around the net for the parts of G+, I'd probably say Communities feel like YouTube comments, public posts feel like the better end of reddit, and private posts (where much of the fun in the author/publishing circles I'm in happens) feel like HN.
No, that was way after Google+ launched. And in this case, forcing users of a successful product A to use it in conjunction with a failing product B, to try to save B, is an unambiguously terrible strategy.
Why do they need another social network? If it helps youtube users, ofc its a good move. But if its means to an end, to create a social network -- I thought their main motive for having a social net of some kind was to use vote/comment/share signals as additional data to improve search and ad placement, given that those are more informative than which link of the ones offered by search you choose to click.
But they don't need a massive social net just for that, and they have G+. Isn't that enough to do the job?
I'm sure this will be a great idea. But I'm going to be honest here, I don't want channels sending me messages. Its another notification on the long list of other notifications I block or disable. I've already unsubscribed from one popular channel because the host used the messaging service to announce a new video. I'll see them when I have time to watch them, don't harass me otherwise.
There's already a perfect solution to getting notifications when new video's are posted on a channel, RSS. It won't bug me unless I ask it to, I don't need a YouTube account for it and I don't have to guess what the (3) next to the channel name actually means (new upload? new like? new algorithm glitch?). I might like to do the same for "Community" posts for some channels but it doesn't look like they do RSS for that (yet?).
I found an option to turn off notifications for those messages. If you open the notification settings for a channel that you're subscribed to, you can uncheck "Include community post notifications" and then stay subscribed to just get the video notifications.
a swing and a miss. there already exist powerful platforms for social sharing that most if not all big youtubers take advantage of.
I have over 700 hundred youtube subscriptions and check out my feed daily. I definitely do not want my subscription feed clogged up with texts, gifs, and whatnot. I really don't care what the political beliefs of XYZ hobby channel have, I watch for their specialized content.
youtube is the powerhouse behind video. stick with that, continue making it better. there is still more to be done.
> a swing and a miss. there already exist powerful platforms for social sharing that most if not all big youtubers take advantage of.
Which is why Google had to develop a native social solution; they were bleeding potential users who need a feasible way to get in touch with their fans. May be simple but it is better than a bare bulb.
For example, the previous method of YouTubers making a simple announcement was to make an announcement video, which is dumb.
Is that dumb though? It's a video site, I go there to watch videos. When the local TV broadcaster wants to make an announcement they do it with video, not a text.
I do see your point, there are some video-centric features YouTube could add but I'm skeptical that's all this will be.
YouTubers have started using services like snapchat that make it very easy to quickly make an announcement/update video. The YouTubers were still using video but using a service that made it far more convenient.
Bleeding potential users? They have much bigger issues than creators keeping in touch with fans. I agree dedicated announcement videos are dumb, I'm more than happy to follow the channel on twitter or facebook if I want their updates. Most of the time I don't. Last thing I want is a forced feed of everyone posting every time they're streaming on twitch. There's already a system to notify there so doubling it up is useless.
Maybe i should just rephrase it to 'timeline' or 'newsfeed'.
I don't think you can credit one single company for 'inventing' the idea of a timeline. Before Twitter there were RSS readers, before that blogs, before that newsgroups, etc. Facebook just did a very good implementation of the idea, obviously inspired by everything that preceded it. Twitter is a good example of that of course.
Sure, every online property is a place for ads. However, in this case content producers don't have to say "Subscribe to my YouTube channel for new videos. Oh, and if you want updates follow me on Twitter. I also share pictures on Instagram. And if you're looking for upcoming events, check out Facebook...".
Not like anyone who is already doing that is going to stop, but Google is hoping that maybe there will be a shift towards doing it all in one place, particularly if video is their primary medium.
YouTube is generally speaking a UX mess and the same goes for all Google products.
On YT, if I am listening to a DJ mix, for example, I don't need to be watching the video (or looking at a still image) for 1 & 1/2 hours, so I will make the window very small. The resizing on desktop now hides the comments and I have to size the window big again to see them. The same video on mobile has the comments under the video and the 'up next' and 'related videos' list under the comments. It's a complete and utter mish-mash of layouts.
Contrast with the "live now" streams; the comments/live chat window is _only_ visible when the window is resized for mobile. Live chat is hidden in full desktop view.
YT is a disaster, and perhaps they should focus on getting some degree of consistency and usability before adding new features and complexity.
This is so true. Using YouTube on iOS is such a bad experience. Add to it that it's not designed as every other iOS app (because hey it's 'material design'), it's just feels so out of place.
I'm probably missing something but it seems like every app I use on iOS is basically an island. Even among Apple apps there seems to be different UX guidelines at play. To me iOS apps feel a lot like flash sites in the late 90s/early 00s in terms of the variety of interfaces. So it doesn't feel out of place to me. The only thing jarring for me is how bright red it is. Not a fan of that.
A testament to what you wrote is when you look at the comment section of this Google blog, where there's a ton of people sharing the article on their Google+, which looks like a bunch of clones repeating what the article just said for some odd reason.
Actually we need better moderation powers when trolls start to fight on our video comments. Some stuff gets offensive with racist, bigoted, and homophobic slurs and other things. It is just not something I'd like to have under my Videos, but when a video gets popular it attracts more people to comment on it and sometimes they are trolls. I think those slurs should trigger some sort of moderation to hide them until they are approved or deleted, like posting multiple links might be spam, etc.
Even the milder comments can sometimes just focus on being so negative that it becomes an irritation.
On the other hand, certain communities have nothing but supportive and positive comments. Much of what I watch doesn't attract a single criticism, people are just happy that the youTubers keep providing quality content.
Excellent! I've always needed a way to interact with the type of people who make Youtube comments!
Seriously though, I get what they're trying to make a play at - the small communities that spring up around content creators based on a certain topic. It's clearly a shot across the bow of Facebook pages which can embed videos in a feed as well as post discussion pieces, etc.
I would've personally liked to see them do it a bit more robustly. This and other platforms allow for creator - consumer interaction, but not consumer - consumer, and I think that's a differentiating strength of content creators on Youtube. Take it from being a copy of a Facebook page, to a sort of hybrid Facebook page/group with one leading creator and then interaction amongst all the consumers of that content. It could've potentially recreated the forums community feel using an existing set of communities as the kickstarter for the platform.
All the YT apps I have tried in the past have failed because it seems YT alter the API so often that developers just give up trying to fix what YT break too often. SO i would assume that this will break all existing apps and some will again die off. No doubt the new features will make it into the API, but at a cost to users and developers.
Yeah, I've seen multiple great YouTube-apps die because of that. The best-functioning YouTube-app that I currently know, actually scrapes the webpage to get its information. It can't do subscriptions because of that, but I can easily replace that with an RSS Reader.
- Have a general-purpose social network, but bootstrapped from a userbase where it can be welcome rather than vilified (unlike Buzz, Google+, etc.)
- Stop the slow trickle of (duplicative, cross-pollinated) traffic from the Youtube community to other platforms, because their own platform is lacking (they needed Twitter-like micro-announcements badly)
- Better arm themselves against other sites that have done video from the beginning but are expected to develop a similar direction (Twitch)
- Better arm themselves against other sites that didn't start off with video but have branched out into it (Facebook & subsidiaries, Twitter & subsidiaries, Tumblr, most other social networks these days)
Hopefully this also stops the (IMO, frankly irrational [1][2][3]) speculation that Twitter will be bought out by Google.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418727#12420732 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083561#12083975 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913828#11914620