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Programmable Restraint
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Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:39:54
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A month or two back, I half-jokingly suggested a Firefox plugin to just completely remove the comments section from Youtube videos.  For those who don't know, Youtube hosts arguably the most unintelligible, bigoted, downright stupefying commentary of all the Internet.  You can simply set the comments to be folded and you know, not view them.  The problem is that I and I suspect many others are just accustomed to reading comments for things.


So, I did it.  Being an Opera user, I used its website settings to add a custom stylesheet that makes the comments disappear altogether and any method for reading them, and I must say, the Youtube experience is much improved.


Silly as it is, having that extra layer of inconvenience preventing me from opening up the comments I know better than to read actually does the trick a mere self-imposition doesn't provide.

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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
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Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:30:28
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I guess it depends on how popular a video is in regards to how many useless comments are posted. I tend to watch mostly low-subscriber videos, and the comments are usually quite enjoyable to read. However, when I check the comments on a very popular video, it's astonishing at how much stupidity and/or sheer meanness can come from some people simply because they believe they are an anonymous avatar on the internet; it reminds me of the crap that goes on during Xbox Live play.

Personally, I wouldn't want to disable Youtube comments, but I certainly can understand why someone would want to.

Edited: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:35:11

The VG Press

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Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:54:00
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Honestly they're usually more entertaining than the videos!

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Sat, 13 Jun 2009 15:30:44
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I agree with Foolz. I come for the videos, but I stay for the comments. I guess it falls into the same deprecating humor that makes me want to read Yahoo Answers.

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Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:40:29
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That's awesome. Do you have a way of "advertising" availability of the plug-in and if so a way of tracking the adoption of it?

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Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:45:24
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For Opera there's nothing really centralized for custom scripts, but for Firefox add-ons, Mozilla's repository maintains stats for weekly and LTD downloads, as well as allows for reviews.

Given that it just hides the comments, I don't think it's worthwhile to make an add-on for, plus there's already one that hides comments that meet an algorithm's criteria for detecting stupidity LOL

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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
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