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."

Comments

Not surprised

[willaien]

Was actually talking about the current "adpocalypse" and its causes, and wondered if youtube wouldn't be eventually working towards disabling comments. In fact, I'd go a step further and start phasing out comments in general. While they increase "engagement", they're so incredibly useless that I definitely wouldn't miss them. Leave chats for livestreams, though, as that actually provides instantaneous feedback that can be valuable.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

"useless" very much depends on the video. Yes, comments on most entertainment-style videos are probably useless, they can be helpful on how-to videos and the like, especially if the channel is small enough that the creator actually sees and responds to the comments.

Re:Not surprised

[Crash Dummy Redux]

Or go one step further by removing ads from all videos featuring children. That would remove the incentives for adults to exploit children for financial gain on YouTube.

Re:Not surprised

[doug141]

[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.

Why stop there?

[alvinrod]

Why stop there? YouTube comments are some of the worst on the internet. Disable them for all videos. Nothing of value will be lost.

Re:Why stop there?

[DontBeAMoran]

YouTube comments on most "how-to" videos can be pretty useful, they're another source of information.

Re:Why stop there?

[barc0001]

How-to videos are a relatively small subset of the total videos on the platform, and even they aren't immune from garbage comments. A quick serach for "how to repair" auto-suggested this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvtoikKG318

Now while the comments on this particular video aren't openly racist, calling for a group's extermination, or cancer, but they're still mostly useless. And the shit-posters on YouTube will start moving around to other videos once they can't comment on a certain category of video as their primary motivation is to shitpost.

Re:Why stop there?

[jetkust]

YouTube comments are some of the worst on the internet.

This comment is worse than most YouTube comments.

In other news...

[Macdude]

In other news YouTube nuked its head office from orbit in order to deal with a mouse found in their cafeteria kitchen.

Re:In other news...

[DontBeAMoran]

Well, it was the only way to be sure. /Aliens

Re:So it has come to this (xkcd 1022)

[Anonymous Coward]

Gab wants to be an external comment section for any 3rd party URL. That is the future of comments.

Hysteria

[Headw1nd]

I thought I had seen some incredible feats of hysteria before, but this has to be a new high water mark. Because some comments *might* be left by perverts, we are just getting rid of them altogether? "Featuring minors" also is incredibly vague, would this include anything with child actors? What about reviews of something that featured child actors?

I feel like this is just going to push yet another chunk of the creator base to other platforms, if they exist. It might be time for Youtube to decide on the content it really wants on its platform and then build outward from there, as they have obviously moved (or been forced) away from just a general video sharing service.

Re:Great

[DarkRookie2]

If you don't like YT, you technically don't have to use it.

YouTube comments cover a spectrum

[TJHook3r]

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.

"Profit"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Nothing is more important to us than

If the next world from a company isn't "profit" then the statement is probably a lie.

A good idea...

[MindPrison]

...not only because of your "regular" suspects.

But one of the major problems kids face today, is the endless onslaught of their peers who often will ridicule them, stalk them - too many times leading to possible suicide, because a kid can't handle snide comments as well as adults, will often hide this from their parents, and suffer in silence, shamed by their anonymous schoolmates and cyberbullies who also are kids, and don't quite understand how serious this is before suicide threats become real.

Personally, I think there should be an age-restriction on video uploads. And commenting should be something that could be in closed circuits only, like family and "approved" friends. Then it would be okay, much like a family album online with keys that only invited parties can get.

Re:A good idea...

[sinij]

You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.

Re:A good idea...

[MindPrison]

You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.

Good parenting is the key. It's not our job to raise peoples kids, but it IS our job to find ways to project the masses from obvious abuse, it might not be ideal, but this is not a perfect world, and youtube is NOT your or my property. As it is now, it's basically just an entertainment platform made by their content creators, either for profit or for fun.

I'd like to live in a sensorship free world, that is my dream, yet as I get older, I realize we need some basic rules for things, for example - if we didn't have any kind of police, we'd basically be a society of survival-of-the-fittest and it'd be total anarchy. No, I don't always agree with the lawmakers, and I hate new rules as much as the next person in here.

But the bullying I've seen of kids, mostly BY other kids - tells me that there's certain media that we're not ready to handle properly yet, and we need some way of regulating it. If YouTube was open source, owned by the public, controlled by the public - it would be a different story, and maybe we'd have better ways of controlling the outcome of this kind of "overwhelming" success.

YouTube is truly victims of their own success, on one hand - they have massive server fees to pay for, on the other hand - they've got millions of entitled people who thinks that their services should remain free and uncensored. You really can't please them all.

I miss the "old" uncensored YouTube - but it ain't worth the life of a single kid, or adult for that matter.

Re:A good idea...

[sinij]

You are choosing to be willfully ignorant that children today are exposed to orders of magnitude more cruelty, meanness, and unnecessary suffering in social settings than we had to face.

This is hysterical overreaction and symptomatic helicopter parenting response. Crime is down, every school is on anti-bullying initiative, every teacher and parent is hypervigilant about all kinds of nonsense issues (i.e. stranger danger).

Children today are insulated to the point that basic coping skills fail to develop due to atrophy. Hence we have trigger warnings and victimhood culture. Just add the numbers, helicopter parenting hysteria started sometime during 80s. Now look at what is going on in Universities and places where most workers are young (startups and tech).