YouTube aims to tame the trolls with changes to its comments section

YouTube's comments section will now be more tied in to the Google+ social network. Photograph: Alamy

The comments section below YouTube videos is an infamously troll-ridden Wild West of abuse, ignorance and spam. But possibly not for much longer.

Google's online video service is rolling out changes to the way comments work on YouTube, giving creators more power to moderate and block comments, and adding new sorting mechanisms to ensure better, more relevant discussions appear at the top.

YouTube announced plans to shake up its comments in September in a blog post titled 'We hear you: better commenting coming to YouTube', acknowledging frequent criticisms of the quality and tone of YouTube comments.

The changes will roll out this week, with product manager Nundu Janakiram and principal engineer Yonatan Zunger explaining in a new blog post that the moves are designed to ensure 'YouTube comments will become conversations that matter to you'.

Channel owners will get new tools to moderate comments before they are published under a video; block certain words and enable auto-approval of comments from specific YouTube users.

The comments section will also be personalised for each viewer. 'You'll see posts at the top of the list from the video's creator, popular personalities, engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles,' explains the post, while noting that viewers will still be able to switch back from this 'Top Comments' order to a 'Newest First' mode.

YouTube users will also be able to start conversations under videos that are only viewable by people in their Circles on the Google+ social network, or by individual friends.

While the changes are mainly about cleaning up YouTube comments, they are just as much about continuing to tie YouTube into Google+, with users having to connect their YouTube accounts to the social network before they can comment.

In their blog post, Janakiram and Zunger claimed that 'the majority of people commenting on YouTube' have already made this connection.

In October, Google announced that there are now 300m active users in the Google+ stream, but 540m active users signed in to Google+ from Google's various services, including YouTube and Gmail.

The promise of a calmer, more constructive comments section on YouTube is, however, slightly undermined by the fact that the second comment in the top thread under the video explaining the changes includes a prominent ASCII penis.