Commenting and rating
Let’s make sure that viewers can interact with the content.
This area puts the social in social video, because it’s important that videos can be interacted with by the viewers. At a minimum, we want a userbase to be able to leave comments and rate videos, and all of the sites could manage this. Of course, the best promotion is when the viewers themselves can post links to your content, and all of the sites that we have tested had a facility to post a link to a video on all the major social networking sites.
Since Google took control of YouTube, it has actually removed some of the social interaction facilities such as the ability to post videos in replies to other videos and a option for users to post private messages to each other. Videos can be voted up, but unfortunately it’s no longer possible to see how many people have voted them down. Despite everything that has been removed in the past, YouTube still has a full complement of features, including the ability to rate comments and sort the comments by newness or popularity.
Odysee looks similar to YouTube, but it has a few extra features. If you hit the @ key while commenting, a pop-up menu appears of users who are relevant to the discussion, and you can reference them in your comment. You can also see how many people have downvoted a video, unlike YouTube of late. Comments can be sorted by Best, Controversial and New categories.
Vimeo covers the basics of commenting and posting links directly to social media, but it’s not possible to rate comments.
This means that there’s no way of making sure any popular comments are pushed to the top. Videos can be liked and the number of likes is visible to viewers.
Facebook Watch inherits all of the features of Facebook itself. In this case, this means that comments can be left for the videos. Videos can be liked and the following emoticons can be attached to videos and comments: Happy, HaHa, Sad, Angry, Wow, Care and Love. Comments from viewers can be rated and those comments can then be sorted due to popularity or newness in a limited way.
DTube has basic features to either like a video or leave comments underneath.