Google: YouTube fights off HUGE ASCII PHALLUS MENACE The integration of YouTube comments with Google Plus has led to a new wave of obscene comment spam and more junk, Google has admitted. The search engine giant has pledged to stick by the new comment system, introduced earlier this month, while fighting, er, harder to eradicate new nuisances such as ASCII penis art and link …
John, what are you smoking? ASCII art pornography indeed? Art is not pornographic (unless you're American) and while ASCII art has a certain retrospective appeal, the concept of ASCII pornography brings back fond memories of line printers.
It's YouTube, home of the farting hippo videos - what does anyone expect? ASCII art pornography sounds like a great improvement.
I used to have a ~10KB text file with a scantily clad ASCII woman, for pasting into IRC channels during quiet times (someone else sticking another line in the middle tended to ruin it). It would take about 10 minutes to send with the anti-spam buffers mind, you could disable those but while you would see the whole thing, everyone else would get just the first 4-5 lines and you'd be speedily disconnected by the network.
Of course, with the non-fixed width fonts now used in comments boxes, these days ASCII has to be fairly limited in size to work (hence it generally being crude renditions of cocks, middle fingers and boobs).
Be careful now....a drawing or depiction of someone in a compromising or provocative position can be deemed as pornography under UK law, even as extreme (illegal) pornography if the illustration can be "interpreted to depict someone under the age of 18". The ASCII art isn't quite so innocently annoying anymore.
Please YouTube, won't someone think of the chillerns?!
Ahhh the internet raises such difficult moral choices - beheading videos on facebook, ascii pornography on you tube, real pornography anywhere else... .. What about maybe talking to someone in meatspace for a change? (Says the author totally unaware of the irony as he types an inane anonymous comment on "el Reg").
"We know the spam issues made it hard to use the new system at first, and we’re excited to see more of you getting involved as we’ve fixed issues. New features like threaded conversations and formatted comments are coming to life, thanks to you and your fans."
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See, that is an example of utter bullshit right there; spam if I ever read it. Next he'll be selling me investments in a Nigerian king's shoe empire.
I've been in youtube for years.
total views around 400,000.
google+ was the second last straw.
I few days after that they stopped 1080p html5, forcing everyone including my viewers to have to view videos in shitey flash to get 1080p
i'm moving all my videos to my smugmug account. I hope others vote with their feet.
I'll lose around £200 quid or so a year advertising revenue from hits, but it'll be worth it .
I had a Google+ account since the very beginning - among the very first to open what was billed as a Facebook Eater. Since then, over the years, I believe that i have logged into it 6 times. Maybe 5, so in the end, I got pissed off with Youtube asking me to join my accounts so I did. Last week I deleted the G+ account and unlinked it from Youtube.
My Youtube account was reset. All my previous comments, all my account settings, all my subscriptions, all purged.
I can no longer interact with Youtube to either like or write comments as I no longer have a G+ account to link to. Oh well, even less worred about my regret of clicking the "ignore ad" button now !
google+ integration sucks. There's no extra protection against trolls because they create fake google+ accounts just as easily as they did youtube/google accounts. The comment section takes longer to load, it's kinda laggy to use and since it went live my videos have had no comments whereas I used to get 5-10 legitimate comments a day.
They should just let google+ die. They gave it a go and it didn't work out. The best Google projects are the ones they bought from someone else and then made free. Youtube, analytics etc. The stuff they make themselves (wave, video, etc) is generally a pile of shite.
perhaps the issue of anonymous commenting in general is the issue? Why does a corporation need to know who you are anyway? They may want it, they may even protest they need it to make money, but so does selling my information (make money for them, that is...).
A few months back there was a flurry around some inappropriate comments on science websites, and the idea of a "respect" button or similar concept was punted. In slashdot, you can choose to not see anonymous comments?
If having your realname plastered on comments is the answer, I think double-triple-etc entendres could be on the up....
P.
Advertisers and those who cater to advertisers (Google) aren't interested in the content of your comment. They are interested in what kind of content you're so interested in that you'll interact with a website about it.
While companies all use their own homegrown valuation systems, all those systems apply extra weight to targets who will interact with and provide content to a website. The idea being that if you are given the tools with which to to interact with and you use them, you're far more likely to click on an advertisement if they can identify the types of content you prefer.
For Google it lets them increase the price they get for ads and for advertisers it lets them better define what type of ads to show you. It's a win-win in every regard except your privacy...
" What sort of person gets scandalised by ASCII art? :-/"
The problem is the loud minority who object that *others* will object to something.
The PC brigade are on a mission to save us from ths supposed horrors that would supposedly upset/corrupt us, even when they actually wouldn't.
Nobody wants google+. We don't want google trying to shove this service down our throats. People are starting to wake up to googles terrible privacy. We should start telling our friends and family about privacy-based alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Ravetree, HushMail, etc.
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