Youtube needs to fix their comment platform.

Youtube has made many of it's content creators very rich. A significant part of their success comes down to the user interaction, through views, shares, likes and comments.

The most subscribed YouTuber of all time, PewDiePie recently removed comments from all his videos. He made a video with his reasons (probably not worth watching, putting it here for reference).

To some, this is a great deal, to many this perhaps has no effect. Either way, it's hard to ignore his 32.1 million subscribers, 6.72 billion views and estimated $10 million net worth. All from commentating over gameplay.

The core issue to him, was that the comment section was of low quality. It was filled with abuse, spam, offensive language and whatever else you could imagine.

He raises a valid point, YouTube comments are horrendous and it has infamous reputation for being bad. Google's attempt at revamping them was also an utter failure.

I put this down to various reasons. I'll discuss the most salient - moderation tools. To think that there is one moderator for millions of views, and thousands of comments is scary. That makes cleaning up inappropriate comments at virtually impossible task. The most effective tool is perhaps the global ban on words or phrases. But that is still limited, and bit old-fashioned. Isn't there a solution?

Give moderators more tools! And perhaps YouTube should allow content producers to add additional moderators! I'm sure there are members of PewDiePie's user base that are dedicated enough to sweeping up the comments. Platforms like reddit allow multiple moderators for its communities, and a greater array of tools for moderators, resulting in a much positive ecosystem. Other platforms need to as well.

Does anyone have some solutions to YouTube comments?

Internet trolls face up to two years in jail under new laws

BBC Article

Quadrupling the sentence to combat cyber-bullying?! My instinct tells me that this isn't right . It's an old school approach to a new school problem.

I also disagree with Mr Grayling's reasoning: 

"No-one would permit such venom in person, so there should be no place for it on social media" 

Calling someone a shit in real-life and a shit over an internet connection do not have the same gravity. He implies that that they do.

He assumes that the internet is only an extension of real life, when in reality it is a parallel world.

For the wants and needs that we cannot fulfill in our day to day lives, we turn to the internet to get our fix, to give our opinions and to contribute. Most importantly, we do it in privacy.  

That is exactly why the internet is a great place. 

And surprise, surprise, BBC still has no commenting section. 

@BritishMonarchy

#selfie

The Queen recently 'embraced' the new information age by officially sending her first tweet. 

It came with great reception, and obviously some jokers took advantage of twitter's anonymous feature. 

A lot of silliness ensued including users asking for personal follows and her opinion on this week's X-factor results.

I would say this is harmless fun, and adds to the beauty of twitter's platform. 

But, trolling also arose, with users telling to her abdicate and a few other things I'm not going to mention. 

So how do we approach these symptoms of anonymous platforms on the internet? Do we police or do we accept and move on?

Special thanks to close friend, Joe Clarke for his source! website up soon: www.joeclarke.me (I felt a bit guilty about not citing him).