YouTube Comments Gain Audio Preview

It's hardly a game-changer, but it's pretty cool. Anyone who's looked at the comments on YouTube posts know that they are certainly not works of literary art. Well, if you heard your comment read back to you, would you still post it, with all its grammar and spelling errors? Perhaps not.

YouTube has added an audio preview feature to its comments. They didn't publicize it, so we only happened to notice it as we were going to comment on a video myself (which we don't do that often). You can see it below.

Our guess is, the lack of publicity is because: they didn't think of it themselves. As a friend of ours pointed out, a couple of weeks ago, xkcd posted a strip called "Listen to Yourself" (below) with just this sort of preview featured as a virus uploaded to YouTube.


As you can see, people started to realize just how moronic their comments were. A couple of Google engineers took it to heart apparently. While a small thing, it still shows how little features can make a difference. By the way, we checked out one of our pet peeves as previewed: it's nuclear, not nucular.