The comments under YouTube videos are not exactly renowned as a location for rigorous intellectual debate, and chances are they never will be. But the Google-owned video service is now taking steps to bring more important and useful comments to the fore — and to let the channel owner automatically delete comments with certain words.
"There's a lot of room for improvement," said Nundu Janakiram, YouTube product manager, when asked about the current state of comments. "So comments will soon become conversations that matter to you."
See also: Can Real Names on YouTube End Nasty Comments?
YouTube already offers a "top comments" section for the most upvoted comments, but they can still often be irrelevant to the video in question. Starting this week on channel pages, and rolling out slowly to video pages by the end of the year, reverse chronological comments will fall away entirely.
You'll start to see a new set of comments rise to the top: those by the video's creator, "popular personalities" (i.e., YouTube celebrities), "engaged discussions" with a long thread, and people you know and interact with — both on YouTube and Google+.
So no two users' YouTube comments section will look quite the same, and Google will be offering another reason for you to use its still-not-quite-popular social network. (You'll be able to post YouTube comments to Google+ automatically, along with the video, by checking a box.)
Finally, channel owners will get the ability to create a blacklist of certain words that they don't want to see appearing in the comments under those videos. Comments containing those words will be sent to purgatory, pending moderation.
Will this help improve the tenor of YouTube's community? Let us know what you think — in our comments section, of course.
Image via Flickr, Rego Korosi