Entry: Take that, YouTube! Saturday, September 29, 2007



Everybody should know about this, so I will post this on all of my blogs. It took me a long night's googling to find, so I want to spread the word.

Yes, it is possible to HIDE COMMENTS ON YOUTUBE.

YouTube recently "improved" their notoriously spam- and idiot-riddled comment system by adding a comment-rating feature, as well as a drop-down menu that lets you choose if you want to view all comments, those rated +10 points, those rated +5 points, those rated 0 or more, -5 or more, or -10 or more. Now wait a minute - how the hell is this division supposed to be useful? Who cares enough about the comments? I sure as hell don't. The new system doesn't keep spammers away, but it makes it a lot easier for idiots to spam, troll and spout hate by sabotaging other people's discussions.

I don't go to YouTube for trolling social interaction, I go there for content, so I choose the option "view comments rated 10 or more". However, YouTube doesn't provide any way of saving my settings. Each time when I return to the site, I have to risk facing stupid comments under interesting videos, and even when I turn off the comments, I can see the comment thread under the video frame. Some people's nicknames alone should be spam-filtered. Luckily, there's a solution. Note: It's for Firefox users.

Step 1: Install the latest version of Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension that helps you to use a lot of nifty little scripts for your special internet needs.

Step 2: Go to userscripts.org and download No YouNoobs. Restart Firefox. Presto!

I found this easy method thanks to plodding through a boring Digg diskussion. I guess Digg has its brights sides after all! Mashable has 12 more useful ideas on how to use Greasemonkey to make YouTube work better.

   4 comments

Turukhtan
October 2, 2007   07:25 PM PDT
 
It could be I haven't read the comments of videos that incite too explosive arguments ... I guess I somehow tend to subconsciously ignore them when I sense that the comments will be nothing but rubbish, like at Englishrussia.com.
Ana
October 2, 2007   01:07 PM PDT
 
Well, the thumbs up-thumbs down-idea is borrowed from digg.com, where it actually seems to work. I guess it also works if the YouTube-video is aimed at a reasonably narrow segment of the audience - that is, people find it because they know what they want. With this plugin, you can simply choose yourself if you want to read the discussion.

I have seen some discussions where it doesn't work, when people actually click thumbs-down for comments that are reasonable and balanced, and thumbs-up for troll comments. And if you have a polarized audience, they are just going to vote down each other's arguments (imagine an Israel-Palestine debate).

There's a time and a place for that, and it's not in my face and in my leisure time...
Turukhtan
September 29, 2007   03:02 PM PDT
 
I often read the comments at YouTube. Sometimes I find interesting extra information among all the noise, sometimes it's just entertaining (like the Turks vs. Mongols disputes under Tuvan music clips).
I've noticed that for some reason the ratings do work - somehow I haven't seen any occurrences of people voting down each other because of differing points of view. People who get a thumb down get it because they are rude. People who get thumbs up get it because they contribute to the content.
Mikko
September 29, 2007   12:00 PM PDT
 
Indeed: http://xkcd.com/202/

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