[KANahas]

I signed up for a one year Nebula subscription after one of my favorite YouTubers posted a discount link. I wanted to support him, and I found the price to be fair. In the few months I’ve been subscribed, I’ve found that the library is much much smaller than I’ve expected. I knew it wouldn’t be YouTube, but I did expect a bit more. The other big pinchpoint I’ve found with Nebula is the lack of comments. Yes, certain parts of YouTube have been known in the past to have a pretty toxic comment section, but the content I watch tends to have valuable, constructive comments that I look forward to reading. Nebula does not support comments at all, and I think that’s by design. Even if they supported comments, I doubt it has enough momentum to have valuable discussions at this point.

[pests]

I had a similar experience with their small library. I honestly had no need to subscribe for a second month because there was nothing left to watch.

[JoshTriplett]

If you care enough about someone's videos to have discussions about them, something like Discord seems like a much better platform for those discussions than a video's comments section. The value of YouTube comments is the ability to easily link to specific mm:ss timestamps, and that could be had with a chat service that creates a thread for each video and auto-links text of the form mm:ss (as well as a "copy video link with timestamp" option on the video host).

[tentacleuno]

I don't know. Saying Discord, a chronological text service, is a good replacement for YouTube comments is like saying Matrix would replace Hacker News.

The main advantage of YouTube comments is being able to gauge the temperature of a video. If the top comment's bad, the video probably isn't great. Combine that with dislikes and you have a semi-decent QC system.

(re: dislikes, Return YouTube Dislikes is a great extension.)