[freeflight]

I also don't understand this, just like the decision to remove certain features over time.

Used to be that YouTube had the option to translate comments from another language, with a button right next to the comment, even before Twitter was doing it.

While not perfect, the translations were usually still good enough to get what people were writing and at times even good enough to have conversations across language borders.

I really used to enjoy that part of YouTube, until the Google+ integration completely removed that option [0]. Sure, now I could just have the browser translate the whole website to read comments, but that always feels super weird and like way more effort than just pressing a simple button right next to a comment.

[0] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/100528/where-did...

[detritus]

I couldn't even manage the other day to get Google Translate to translate a YouTube page so I could read comments mostly written in cyrillic to a Russian video about the protests over there.

Perhaps I was doing something wrong (I don't think so), perhaps it's because I use Firefox and this was a gentle nudge to get me to try in Chrome, or perhaps it's just another one of Google's infuriating and perplexing 'quirks'.

[gnochi2001]

Because in the current data-snowflake regulatory and legislative climate, it’s too tough to get away with monetising content sent in a ‘private’ context. Googles business model relies on being able to index and advertise to every phrase you post, but I’m sure they don’t want to run into the same issues fb has, because fb posts have an expectation of privacy. Hence google has no interest in providing a private messaging platform.

[Crosseye_Jack]

And yet they provide a private messaging platform on their mobile OS and online. Chat will be replacing hangouts, it’s where the devs from Allo went to and supports things like RCS.