14 DAY TRIAL // The folks working at the YouTubeplex just launched a new comment system for the online video sharing platform, allowing the consumers to use a Digg-style technology. If you've never heard of Digg, it is a community-based webpage that provides one click access to news from all sorts of domains including technology, science, sports, gaming and others. Because it is entirely based on the support offered by its users, Digg also offers a comment system that enables them to post, rank and flag messages. Well, a similar technology was implemented in Google's video sharing service along with a filtering system for viewing only high/low ranked comments.
It's quite a good idea if we think about the amount of spam appearing in the YouTube comments. From now on, you can filter the messages and see only the great (+10 or more), the good (+5 or more), the average (0 or more), the poor (-5 or more) or the very poor (-10 or more) comments. The parent company didn't make any official announcement about this new system, but the fans of the Digg website had at least interesting reactions.
"The YouTube comments are just awful. With Digg, even comments that are -10 aren't spam, plus everyone has something pretty reasonable to say, where on YouTube it's the same dumb things over and over. I really like it," one user says. "Yay, just went there and buried all chain letters I came across. I'm starting to like YT again. At least until they start overlaying ads," another added.
Remember that YouTube has a huge community of users and the service urgently needed this kind of function. For example, a clip posted on the main page of the service has no less than 2172 comments. Just one spammer can easily annoy all the other users, but what's more important is that it affects the product's image and might make some consumers stop using the service.