Even if the YouTube comments will be of higher quality in the long run, there is one functionality problem that I am wondering how Google will resolve. That is, enabling Safe Search on your Google Account will turn on Safety Mode by default in YouTube [1]. This in turn will auto-hide comments. This makes for a very poor user experience for those who wish to see comments by default but also keep their Safe Search on - something that was possible prior to the merge.
I'm curious about your use case. Why would you be okay with YouTube comments (which could be full of profanity and/or the names of reproductive organs) but still want Safe Search enabled?
Isn't that a pretty broad brush you're using there? Not all comments are full of profanity and/or the names of reproductive organs. Wouldn't your approach to Safe Search be to not return any links (which could be full of profanity and/or the names of reproductive organs)?
Then wouldn't it make more sense to complain that Safety Mode should filter "bad" comments rather than all comments entirely than to complain that you want Safety Mode and Safe Search to be in different states?
I thought the point of these features was "think of the children" (and letting kids access comments that aren't moderated is a big no-no in online safety), but clearly there are use cases that aren't being captured here.
fluidcruft was right on the money. You're painting quite a broad stroke on the comments there. To elaborate, my use case is this:
On YouTube, the only channels I read comments on are the educational ones (Crash Course, Grey Explains, SciShow, etc.). For everything else, I don't care much for hearing what other people think. So in my use case, I honestly haven't seen much profanity or bad comments in my entire time using YouTube.
For Google, I use strict Safe Search because I don't care for NSFW content. I also work at a school and when I need to search for images to use on handouts, I don't want any NSFW content to appear.
> Then wouldn't it make more sense to complain that Safety Mode should filter "bad" comments rather than all comments entirely than to complain that you want Safety Mode and Safe Search to be in different states?
No, because prior to Google forcing my G+ account to merge with my legacy YouTube account, I was able to have these in different states. YouTube had Safety Mode off and Google had Safe Search on. If Google is going to force people to merge accounts, then they should not be removing functionality that existed when the accounts were separate. Complaining for a feature to change, when it was working perfectly fine on its own before, is far less productive than pointing out how two features worked separately before they were merged together. This also ties in with what theOnliest says below. There is a very distinct different between the two use cases (reading YouTube comments and using Google Search). It does not make sense to merge the two features; especially if you aren't going to rename then into a single feature (there is no indication on YouTube and Google Preferences that changing one will affect the other).
I'm not a heavy YouTube user, but I think I'm in a similar situation. If I am on YouTube I often want to read the comments (I have no moral problem with any of them), but if I'm searching for something on Google I don't usually want a bunch of spam/porn/whatever gets filtered by SafeSearch in the way of what I'm actually searching for. When I search I'm looking for something, and when I'm on YouTube I'm usually wasting time...they're very different use cases.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/174084?hl=en