i mean, you gotta understand that a big part of what i'm doing right now is saving the comments before they disappear, rather than deleting them.

almost everything on youtube will eventually be deleted. when google+ and youtube were integrated, that didn't matter - the comments remained on google+. even when the video was removed. i would not have moved here, otherwise.

but, now there's a link to "view comments on youtube" that just goes to a 404.

if i don't do this, i will lose all of the comments.

and, so why keep commenting here at all?

like, i need to be clear.

i haven't lost a couple of comments.

i've lost hundreds of threads - many that carried on for months, with dozens of people.

hundreds of pages worth of writing.

hours - days, weeks - of my time.

and, i'm not happy about that.

if you're a heavy user of the comment section on youtube, take a flip through your google+ profile. it's no doubt a bloodbath.

this isn't a safe place to type.

so, it's kind of wrongheaded for you to think i'm destroying my profile.

i'm saving my writing.

i've cleared off the first six months of 2014. and, even with the dozens of threads that i've lost, it's over 280 pages. that suggests i should get over a thousand pages off by the time i'm done - and that i've lost who knows how much.

what i'll say, at least, is that most of what i've lost seems to be related to album discussions rather than politics. i'm not crying persecution or anything. i'm not being targeted. it was just incredible incompetence on the programming side of things, and it's left me with absolutely no confidence in the platform.

again: up until a point in late august, 2015,  videos going down did not delete the comments. so, comments could be made safely at youtube with the understanding that they would be archived at google+. with no warning that i received, the products were separated at the snap of a finger and all of the archived comments were deleted. these were comments that the previous system had safely stored in the google+ profiles, even though the videos were down.

the reality is that the separation deleted large amounts of google+ content.

i've been posting hyperlinks at google+ since, waiting for a youtube comment feed to appear. it's not happening. so, i'm cutting my losses and getting out.