[JoshTriplett]

If you care enough about someone's videos to have discussions about them, something like Discord seems like a much better platform for those discussions than a video's comments section. The value of YouTube comments is the ability to easily link to specific mm:ss timestamps, and that could be had with a chat service that creates a thread for each video and auto-links text of the form mm:ss (as well as a "copy video link with timestamp" option on the video host).

[tentacleuno]

I don't know. Saying Discord, a chronological text service, is a good replacement for YouTube comments is like saying Matrix would replace Hacker News.

The main advantage of YouTube comments is being able to gauge the temperature of a video. If the top comment's bad, the video probably isn't great. Combine that with dislikes and you have a semi-decent QC system.

(re: dislikes, Return YouTube Dislikes is a great extension.)

[JoshTriplett]

If the top comment is bad, the video author probably doesn't delete comments.

[pseudalopex]

What is your point? They didn't say the video is good if the top comment is good.