Google tentacle slips over YouTube comments: Now YOUR MUM is at the top

Google's mission creep into more aspects of our online lives continued apace on Tuesday, after the company confirmed that it was tailoring YouTube comments to be more "relevant" to its users.

What this means is that netizens accessing the video-sharing site will no longer be able to easily view the most recent comments made by strangers.

Google said that, instead, "comments will soon become conversations that matter to you."

It added: "In the coming months, comments from people you care about will rise up where you can see them, while new tools will help video creators moderate conversations for welcome and unwelcome voices."

YouTube's revamped conversation threads will freeze out angry and, apparently, irrelevant commentards from the debate.

But Google's decision to supposedly silence trolls is not really an effort to make YouTube a happier place for those joyless people who don't want to see angry comments appear on video feeds.

That's because the latest iteration of YouTube's comments system is, unsurprisingly, being heavily integrated into Google+, the company's flagging social network that has been bolted onto Google's far more popular online properties such as Gmail.

Google explained how the ID-scraping caper will work:

You can choose to start a conversation so that it is seen by everyone on YouTube and Google+, only people in your Circles or just your bestie. Like Gmail, replies are threaded so you can easily follow conversations.

Meanwhile, YouTube users can now moderate comments posted on their vids. They can review them, censor certain words or auto-approve comments from "certain fans". Previously, moderation was a power only granted to certain users during special events.

What does this behaviour sound like to you, dear readers? Surely not the actions of a huge advertising corporation that understands that the best way to make money is to ensure that the content that it hosts is stripped bare of controversy, all the while feeding handy "anonymised" profiles of its users - complete with valuable details unconsciously supplied by them during their everyday interactions with fellow users - to admen? ®