Eight years after posting the first-ever video on YouTube, co-founder Jawed Karim has returned from the shadows … to complain about the new requirement that YouTube users login to Google+ to leave a comment.
Karim, who goes by the name Jawed on YouTube, left the following comment about a week ago – his first comment ever. Just a warning, the comment is NSFW:
“why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?” Karim wrote.
The comment has struck a chord with YouTube users, who have reposted his comment repeatedly on the video “Me at the zoo,” which shows Karim at the San Diego Zoo making a coy joke about elephants’ “really long … trunks.” The video was posted by Karim in April of 2005, and is the only video Karim ever posted.
Originally announced in September, YouTube’s Google+ comment integration was finalized earlier this week. By requiring users to link their YouTube comments with their Google+ profile, the company hopes to bring a level of civility to the notoriously horrendous comments often found on the video sharing site. The change also allows highly rated comments to appear at the top by default, while pushing less popular comments further down the page.
Like Karim, many YouTube users despise the new Google+ comment integration feature, and see it as a blatant attempt by Google, which owns YouTube, to link YouTube comments with users’ real identities for the purposes of data collection.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Instagram is testing a new format for long-form videos called Features. It allows select creators to upload horizontal videos running up to 90 minutes long. Instagram has already tested the new format with creators in Brazil, and now, it's expanding to tens of thousands of creators across the US.
How will Instagram's new Features format work?