Anger and fury continues to grow over the integration of YouTube comments with Google+ as long-time video makers react to woes and community disruption caused.

When Google announced the upcoming replacement, debates broke out about the anti-anonymous nature of Google+ while also noting some positive benefits. Google+ comments allow users to hold highly connected, social media conversations and allow for much longer comments than the usual YouTube fare. Of course, these benefits have proven to be a double-edged sword.

Almost immediately after the comments switched over, video creators discovered that sometimes they could not comment on their own videos. Others couldn’t reply to some comments. Many ran into a situation where comments stopped working on the previous videos. Many of these are simply technical issues that will probably be ironed out–what won’t iron out so well is the cultural changes that have come along with the roughshod integration.

Before G+ became the de facto function of YouTube comments, those comments had already become well known as a poor place to communicate. Especially for larger channels, where the more childish impulses of the community tended to percolate up. With the change to G+, this hasn’t gotten any better.

YouTube video game reviewer and journalist, TotalBiscuit was given cause to dedicated a full half of one of his vlogs to speaking to why he’d turned off comments on some of his newer videos. Amidst his complaints he cited the fact that the new system had opened up a whole new can of worms when it came to content. Some of that content began to include ASCII art of penises.

Of course, the march of the phalluses couldn’t even hold a candle to what the G+ comment system does to actual discourse. Old YouTube, comments rose to the top because people liked them (and voted positively) and that was bad enough. The G+ of now uses a metric of controversy and the curation system rewards posts that generate a lot of talk–so that means trolls will find themselves well placed to get their drama stirring moved swiftly to the top.

TotalBiscuit might not be leaving–but other video bloggers, such as math-guru Vi Hart are abandoning ship.

YouTube will go on, but it’s going to be a stranger place

Google wants to build a brave new world with social media, videos curated for the most eyeballs on advertisers and now also those comments that generate the most hate and fury.

It’s not like YouTube didn’t already have a reputation for having a seedy underbelly, now that underbelly will be at the top of the pile every time it gets a chance.

Add to the mix that G+ is ultimately a social media platform that wants to get its claws into its participants. That means that every time a comment is shared on G+ there will be an alert, so a single video from a popular YouTuber who actually spends time interacting with users may be seeing upwards to some staggering number of alerts.

That little bell at the top of every search or Google-related page will be spilling over with digits with every share, reply, and comment that comes down the pipe. Nobody who uses Google services will be far from their YouTube comments and that may prove interesting.

Tools for community rather than a community of tools

Google has not been a good force for social media. Google+ is an interesting space that kinda-sorta works and seems as if it has sucked the lifeblood out of more interesting social media projects at the behest of the company and now it’s poised to invade everything else Google touches.

What Google could do instead of producing an automatically curated community (with those pesky algorithms that will bubble trolls to the top) the best move would be to give video makers the tools to curate and moderate their own comments. Not just those to find and dump spammers or ban malcontents–but also tools to call out good comments and encourage good while diminishing the bad.

Certainly Google has shown us that computer code can do a great deal. It can find relevance in huge stacks of links, produce a result fill of needles from a haystack the size of the Internet; but in the end it’s not just the ghost in the machine that makes a thriving community, it’s the spirit at the heart of the conversation.

Right now, YouTube is a wasteland for spirit and the cold hard number of the algorithm will leave many wanting.