Despite the title being about YouTube, this is fundamentally about Safari's declarative Content Blocker API being totally inadequate in the face of modern ad delivery technologies. Yes, it's fast and relatively more secure compared to old ad blocking techniques (which requires granting full access to effectively arbitrary JS), but ad tech has evolved since 2015 and Safari's Content Blocking API has not evolved with it.
With other browsers showing varying degrees of interest in declarative content blocking, it's worth looking at Safari as a warning of what declarative content blocking, if unmaintained, will do to cripple ad blocking for users.
Not sure if "better commenting", or just another attempt to integrate G+ into every Google-owned property.
The part about floating "engaged discussions" to the top is interesting. One hopes the algorithm distinguishes between "ongoing informative discussion" and "blazingly active flamewar".
Is there any sort of proof of this "optimization" actually contributing to performance? The state of compiler optimization being what it is, I find it hard to imagine flag tweaking from the default -O3 or whatever can make an actual significant difference. The secretiveness of his build seems designed to obfuscate third-party replication of his results.
Seems more a mouthpiece for the this fellow's self-aggrandizement than anything else.
Something like this is long overdue, I think. Great work. Open academic publication models have had a difficult time for a number of reasons, but systems like this are very helpful in making the case for openness.
One thing that always bothers me with a purely Reddit-style, point-based system for surfacing academic discussions across domains, though, is that it's unclear what kind of papers are being surfaced: a very good paper in a very niche space may not get the attention that a mediocre paper written for a mass audience (for some definition of "mass") would. Is that an acceptable drawback for openjournal? Or should there be some way for niche papers to gain exposure? Forking openjournal and making your own "sub-openjournal" for your research domain? Weighted voting mechanisms?
Also, like reddit, it might be useful to have a mechanism to demonstrate, emphasize, and/or sort by specific commenters' backgrounds, training, and credentials. For many domains, peer review and commentary from people in the same field might be more useful than general commentary.
As a minor wish, I've always wanted to see a mechanism for encouraging sharing of implementations, test code, and other raw experimental results along with the actual papers. 'Cause really, for most cases, I'm not going to implement a multi-page algorithm just to verify a conclusion or make use of an insight. But if I can fork and compile a github repo associated with the paper...
With other browsers showing varying degrees of interest in declarative content blocking, it's worth looking at Safari as a warning of what declarative content blocking, if unmaintained, will do to cripple ad blocking for users.