YouTube’s Comment System Sucks
We’re almost at the end of year 2009, and the commenting system on YouTube still sucks like horseshit.
I followed its evolution throughout the years, but nothing has really improved. The worst thing of all this is that people don’t seem to realize it, and a lot of them use YouTube comments to make incredibly elaborated conversations (mostly flames) that go on even for days.
Anyway, here’s my list of reasons why commenting on YouTube sucks.
- Disorganization: any video on YouTube, even the most obscure one, has an incredible amount of comments. From one of the most visited websites on the Internet, one would expect at least features such as threaded comments and paging. Forget about them on YouTube. Welcome to a world of madness, where your messages will be buried within minutes after posting and replies are just orphan pieces of text lying around in the mess.
- Poor use of AJAX: since the boom of Web 2.0, I’ve never seen a comment system not using AJAX technlogies. A proper use of AJAX would be, for example, allowing the user to see the comment he/she has just posted without reloading the page. Guess what? YouTube is not able to do this (and we’re talking about a video streaming website, where you would expect to be able to use controls in the page while still playing your video).
- Even more disorganization: suppose you want to read all the comments posted for a specific video: easy, there’s the “View all comments” link at the bottom. Now suppose that specific video is about a farting baby. YouTube will show the whole pack of a thousand comments in a single page! This is not only impracticable for reading, but it also forces you to download an huge amount of data at once.
- No basic features: as an effect of all the previous reasons, there’s no way to collapse threads (that would make it a bit less messy), no custom sorting (oldest or newest first) and no way to choose how many comments to show per page.
Well, I guess this is enough to say without any doubt that the comment system on YouTube is a total fail. Not to count that the actual content of the comments is pure garbage and there’s a flame even on the most insignificant video out there, but that’s another story.
You are absolutely right about this. I’ve never seen ajax being used so poorly.
But then again, youtube’s site in general is an actual mess… can’t believe it recieves usability awards :s
yep. i’ve always hated youtube’s commenting system.
i love how if you exceed your commenting limit, it will give you an error, but not allow you to copy and paste the comment you just made. hope you have a perfect memory!
but my main beef is the same as yours: no threading.
you get a notice in your mail that someone replied to your comment. you’d like to reply back to them to continue ur hilarious flame war or something along those lines and you can’t even find the post.
half the time even if you use the “view all comments” feature, and ctrl-f for your reply, you won’t find it because either it was marked as spam (requiring you to view the html source of the page to find your comment) or it just disappeared magically as is often the case with youtube’s shitty commenting system.
the only reason they receive usability awards is because of politics. they’re a huge name on the internet and lots of money flows in and out of them. it’s the same reason al gore and obama have gotten nobel prizes. they’re completely political and therefore meaningless now.
Dave Bandel,
Hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!
Yeah! And to think Youtube is owned by Google! Google for gods sakes. Its almost as if Youtube is their Red Headed Step Child, seeing as every year they see more and more of a deficit and aren’t making enough money with it.
I agree, totally. But what can we do?
I did complain one time there to admins but nothing changed….
Whish it was still the old, ugly, disorganized but very functional and usable interface…. The new one seams to me an epic fail…will leave the tube for other platforms.
Yeah, the new interface sucks even more… too bad it wasn’t part of the April Fool’s joke.
What sucks is that you can’t edit your comments.
You can delete them, but often when you repost them they don’t appear.
You cannot post a link in your comments either, and sometimes they say you can’t post your comment when you see no error in it.
And the maximal length of comments is really limited.
Youtube is really a shitty site, they really should do some improvements!