This is sad. As someone who loves browsing the "hidden" side of YT where videos and channels with sub 3 and 4 digit viewcount lurk and discovering weird obscure content, this feature was a godsend. I have been able to contact users that otherwise leave absolutely no contact info on their pages to ask them about certain content they have uploaded on multiple occasions.
I really dislike how stuff like twitter and Instagram have become the standard form of reaching anyone, as I have neither and your messages can very easily become ignored due to the very nature of how these two social networks operate.
I even managed to probed one guy who only had 3 videos to start posting again. I asked him when he would make more videos. I wonder if anybody else did.
>I really dislike how stuff like twitter and Instagram have become the standard form of reaching anyone, as I have neither and your messages can very easily become ignored due to the very nature of how these two social networks operate.
I don't get where this sense of entitlement comes from. Why do you think you have any right to contact creators or that they shouldn't ignore your messages?
Sad. They simply should give content producers the option of whether they want to receive messages or not. (Similar to how you can turn comments on or off). This way, individuals who received "targeted harassment" could be free of it, and other individuals who don't have this problem, or are more thick-skinned or tolerant, can receive messages. (One complaint in a recent lawsuit against YouTube is that Google allow users to "harass" content creators. See https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/lgbtq-youtube-lawsuit-... ). I'm sympathetic to their concerns, and turning off the ability to write messages or contact is one solution. There are already some controls available.
I've used these messages quite a bit to contact people with similar "niche" interests (restoring old electronic equipment from WWII era through the 60s) and it's very useful.
That's impossible to do. A feature like that would be fairly simple to implement, and would make sense, so it can't be done by Google. Google products always have to have some kind of glaring missing feature.
An example I found not long ago is with Google Photos. If you create an album, you can offer to share that album with other people, through their Google account, their phone number, their email, etc. If they accept the invitation, it notifies you and their little circle darkens. If not, it stays light, and still stays in your list of people you've shared with. There's no way to actually remove these unused invites, and these people just stick around as "ghosts" forever. The only way to clean this mess up, according to Google, is to turn off all sharing of your album, and then re-share with everyone you want to share it with, so they all have to re-accept the share invitation (and you have to manually enter in every email address, phone number, etc. again). There's no way to just remove one of these "ghosts", even though you'd think this is a very basic admin task. There's forums where people have complained about this for years, and there is a Google person on there who just complains about people using the forum for complaining like this instead of filing an "official" feature request (which as we all know never goes anywhere), even though this Google person could very well do this herself instead of complaining about all the complaints.
People like to play the victim. They will leave private messages on, get messages they don't like, and then produce bad PR for YouTube due to this. It's honestly the right move strategically given their goals.
This was actually a pretty well-used feature back around ~2010. The problem was that it was hidden away more and more every time the site was redesigned, so its discoverability (and presumably use) basically dropped to zero over time.
I assumed it had already been quietly dropped, rather than just effectively hidden. It would be interesting to see how much use it actually gets these days.
I had no idea about this too. I think it makes sense then that this is being removed. The feature is not well known but it must be putting a lot of burden on their team to keep it clean and protect it from abuse.
Exactly, I wonder how many people even know of this. From what I've seen following a few youtubers, most of them request that you contact them through Twitter or Instragram DMs.
It's so funny seeing Zawinski's Law hold up after all this time (replacing "email" with "messaging"), and Google again fighting it.
I wish the culture of SaaS development would move away from this try-to-do-everything mentality that always leads to anciliary features being modified or removed, and instead focus on honing their core offering. No user cheers a feature going away -- either they're ambivalent about it or annoyed for having to switch away.
How come the orangered envelope is cherished on reddit, but youtube discontinues the same feature? Has google entirely given up on getting a social network?
Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment. Then they can offer an optional! integration with their other messenger apps which would allow them to compete with facebook.
Is is cherished? There is literally a meme that "orange envelope = who did I piss off now?". And granted there is a little bit of worthwhile content on Reddit, but it's basically the equivalent of reading Facebook at this point in time. Especially in what used to be the default subs.
I also don't understand this, just like the decision to remove certain features over time.
Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it.
While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders.
I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment.
YouTube with a bit more work would make an amazing social network. Like games, people tend to share/centralise their conversations around a type of media - it's why Steam & Discord are now technically popular social networks.
A proper investment in a social sharing feature centred around your friends on YouTube would be a great idea. Not only for watching together with friends but for sharing it privately (just look at how popular video is on Snapchat). They even have a stories feature already - but for YouTubers to talk to fans!
I've been using YouTube since it came out and today was the first time I've heard you could send messages.
I'm guessing it is an under-used feature and causing more harm overall than good. I'm assuming they expect folks to communicate on video comments if they want to talk about the video in question.
Everyone on HN seems to assume that Google has some sort of grand master product plan.
News at 11 : they most certainly don't, as can be ascertained by the gigantic random walk their product update strategy has been in the last few years.
Observing them from the outside, I sometimes even come to doubt their grand master business plan (I'm assuming they have one of those, which is also a doubtful proposition)
is to make money.
> Has google entirely given up on getting a social network?
The problem is moderation. Youtube has enough on their hands dealing with trolls, conspiracy crap, spam, Nazis/other hate speech, propaganda, pedophiles, animal/child abusers, terrorists, copyright, ... - they don't really have the resources to deal with the inevitable sausagefests in the inboxes of women and the other hate that this feature would be used if it were more widely known.
Their obscure social networks (g+, Reader, ...) are/were niche enough to not attract too many abusers of all kind.
I don't imagine the average consumer would ever notice but I wonder how much it is used by youtubers to arrange collaboration between different channels in similar spaces. At least as a way of establishing initial contact.
It would be a shame to see collaboration between channels drop as that, in my opinion, is one of the best parts of the medium.
You’d think they’d simply migrate to one of their other redundant chat products!
But no, I suppose just killing the feature with no meaningful replacement strategy is the new GOOGLE WAY™. I can’t wait to invest all my money in a library of Stadia games that will surely last forever. /s
[+] [-] utf985|6 years ago|reply
I really dislike how stuff like twitter and Instagram have become the standard form of reaching anyone, as I have neither and your messages can very easily become ignored due to the very nature of how these two social networks operate.
[+] [-] not_a_cop75|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maniflames|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxpor|6 years ago|reply
I don't get where this sense of entitlement comes from. Why do you think you have any right to contact creators or that they shouldn't ignore your messages?
[+] [-] fortran77|6 years ago|reply
I've used these messages quite a bit to contact people with similar "niche" interests (restoring old electronic equipment from WWII era through the 60s) and it's very useful.
[+] [-] magduf|6 years ago|reply
An example I found not long ago is with Google Photos. If you create an album, you can offer to share that album with other people, through their Google account, their phone number, their email, etc. If they accept the invitation, it notifies you and their little circle darkens. If not, it stays light, and still stays in your list of people you've shared with. There's no way to actually remove these unused invites, and these people just stick around as "ghosts" forever. The only way to clean this mess up, according to Google, is to turn off all sharing of your album, and then re-share with everyone you want to share it with, so they all have to re-accept the share invitation (and you have to manually enter in every email address, phone number, etc. again). There's no way to just remove one of these "ghosts", even though you'd think this is a very basic admin task. There's forums where people have complained about this for years, and there is a Google person on there who just complains about people using the forum for complaining like this instead of filing an "official" feature request (which as we all know never goes anywhere), even though this Google person could very well do this herself instead of complaining about all the complaints.
[+] [-] fuzz4lyfe|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ilikehurdles|6 years ago|reply
I wish the culture of SaaS development would move away from this try-to-do-everything mentality that always leads to anciliary features being modified or removed, and instead focus on honing their core offering. No user cheers a feature going away -- either they're ambivalent about it or annoyed for having to switch away.
[+] [-] rubberstock|6 years ago|reply
Google seems to constantly create new messenger apps. Why would they discontinue the one that could be used to turn youtube into a real social network? Instead of hiding the feature, they should enhance it and make it usable, i.e. make it easy to block harassment. Then they can offer an optional! integration with their other messenger apps which would allow them to compete with facebook.
[+] [-] tenpies|6 years ago|reply
Is is cherished? There is literally a meme that "orange envelope = who did I piss off now?". And granted there is a little bit of worthwhile content on Reddit, but it's basically the equivalent of reading Facebook at this point in time. Especially in what used to be the default subs.
[+] [-] freeflight|6 years ago|reply
Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it.
While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders.
I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment.
[0] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did...
[+] [-] cameronbrown|6 years ago|reply
A proper investment in a social sharing feature centred around your friends on YouTube would be a great idea. Not only for watching together with friends but for sharing it privately (just look at how popular video is on Snapchat). They even have a stories feature already - but for YouTubers to talk to fans!
[+] [-] res0nat0r|6 years ago|reply
I'm guessing it is an under-used feature and causing more harm overall than good. I'm assuming they expect folks to communicate on video comments if they want to talk about the video in question.
[+] [-] ur-whale|6 years ago|reply
News at 11 : they most certainly don't, as can be ascertained by the gigantic random walk their product update strategy has been in the last few years.
Observing them from the outside, I sometimes even come to doubt their grand master business plan (I'm assuming they have one of those, which is also a doubtful proposition) is to make money.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mschuster91|6 years ago|reply
The problem is moderation. Youtube has enough on their hands dealing with trolls, conspiracy crap, spam, Nazis/other hate speech, propaganda, pedophiles, animal/child abusers, terrorists, copyright, ... - they don't really have the resources to deal with the inevitable sausagefests in the inboxes of women and the other hate that this feature would be used if it were more widely known.
Their obscure social networks (g+, Reader, ...) are/were niche enough to not attract too many abusers of all kind.
[+] [-] OliverJones|6 years ago|reply
Are they trying to make it harder to weaponize nasty content?
Or do they just want to save a few bucks by stopping maintenance on a feature?
[+] [-] VBprogrammer|6 years ago|reply
It would be a shame to see collaboration between channels drop as that, in my opinion, is one of the best parts of the medium.
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcdoodle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninedays|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtirloni|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] FreakyT|6 years ago|reply
But no, I suppose just killing the feature with no meaningful replacement strategy is the new GOOGLE WAY™. I can’t wait to invest all my money in a library of Stadia games that will surely last forever. /s
[+] [-] tomschlick|6 years ago|reply
Too risky. They are probably going to deprecate those for another chat product in 6 months.
[+] [-] calibas|6 years ago|reply
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