Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Will Disable Comments on Nearly All Videos With Kids (variety.com)
YouTube said today it will disable the ability for viewers to leave comments on most videos featuring minors, as it tries to contain the damage from a scandal involving child predators leaving coded sexual comments on the site. From a report: YouTube said in a blog post Thursday that over the past week it had already disabled comments from "tens of millions of videos" that could be subject to predatory behavior. Now, it will expand that to suspend comments on virtually all videos featuring young minors, as well as videos featuring older kids that "could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior." In a tweet, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki linked to the update and explained the change: "Recently, there have been some deeply concerning incidents regarding child safety on YouTube. Nothing is more important to us than ensuring the safety of young people on the platform."
And spectrum is quite an apt word when discussing these comments on a public message board. For technical videos though, like coding, comments are frequently useful. For tech/gadget reviews - also useful. Game review comments - getting less useful. Would be useful to have an aggregate score rather than hundreds of inane comments. Comedy clip comments - the worst! It's ironic that some of the most excruciatingly unfunny comments should follow a comedy clip but there you go.
[comments are] so incredibly useless that I definitely wouldn't miss them.
I disagree. When I see a video making an incorrect statement, I often see the highest voted comment is one making a correction. I think this is great.