YouTube hasn’t changed their format for awhile, though small updates have been made. Today they announced that they will be switching up the way they handle comments, including sorting them by relevance rather than date, and connecting it all with Google+.
Not only will relevant comments be given full priority rather than just the top two highest rated as it is today. They will also be threaded so you can easily read the way people are speaking with one another. This is a big improvement to the current system that has been in place for too long, where you have to actually pull up comments that are being quoted to see what people were responding to.
Google+ will also be more integrated in a further move by Google to connect all of their services into an all encompassing monopoly that spans the web. It will push to eliminate anonymity, such as their unpopular choice to try and force people to use their real names on accounts, and suspending Google+ profiles for using aliases.
Something that is interesting about this change is the way it ranks relevance. Many sites will based this entirely on keywords. But this YouTube will be customized to match the needs of the user, as explained by the official YouTube Blog announcement:
“When it comes to the conversations happening on YouTube, recent does not necessarily mean relevant. So, comments will soon become conversations that matter to you. In the coming months, comments from people you care about will rise up where you can see them, while new tools will help video creators moderate conversations for welcome and unwelcome voices.”
Basically, people in your Google+ circles, popular Youtube personalities and the poster of the video will have a higher priority for showing comments. Others from random people will be pushed down. Comments can also be voted up or down as they are now, which will influence the final ranking and where it shows on the video.
I don’t know if this is a good thing, or not. First of all, who honestly uses Google+? No one except Google staff, and even most of them seem to be updating through Twitter. Second, it gives priority to “YouTube personalities”. Which seems to suggest that the average YouTube user doesn’t have anything good to say.
Granted, that is true a lot of the time. But it still seems shady to push them down for people who pay YouTube for advertising.
Source: YouTube Blog
