Youtube audio preview
If people could have their Youtube comments read aloud to them prior to posting, would it help reduce moronic ones? Randall Munroe, the author of the cool xkcd web comic probably thinks so, as the September 26th issue outlines this idea. Anyone who's read comments on Youtube will very likely agree.
It's probably not a coincidence that sometime yesterday (October 7th) people began noticing a new button that periodically appears by the "post comment" button - it says "Audio Preview" and does exactly that! Xkcd must be popular with the development team at Youtube since there's no other way a feature like this would be deployed, never mind a mere 2 weeks after that issue came out under normal circumstances.
Just posting to spread the word and document this since there's not much info on it yet. The preview button appeared to me today as I was posting on a Monty Python sketch, and seems to be appearing consistently now.
Also, I found these curious few lines in youtube's page javascript:
var commentPreviewEnabled = false;
var previewCommentAge = '18';
var previewCommentSex = 'm';
var previewCommentLocation = 'basement';
Which is quite funny, and seems to be related. Enable comment previews for 18 year old males living in their mom's basements? Haha, the sex and age variables are probably determined by the profile of the viewer, but it just seemed funny enough to mention. I'll update this article with any further things I discover.
