YouTube has implemented minor changes in recent months. A notable change is the introduction of an obscure theme for the web version, a new loading animation and small animated previews of videos that are reproduced by moving the mouse over a thumbnail of the video. YouTube has also updated its apps for iOS and Android. The new update includes a chat feature. It is based on sharing functionality and requires access to YouTube with your Gmail account. It doesn’t automatically sync contacts in your Gmail account, so you have the option to choose who to interact with. Here we show you how to use YouTube chat on your iOS or Android phone.
Update the YouTube app and open it. There is no dedicated “Chat” or “Messages” tab in the app, so it is a bit confusing on how to start.
Find a video you like and tap the arrow to share it below it. The share sheet will show you frequent contacts. These are excerpts from your Gmail account; however, they are not your YouTube contacts. You need to add them to YouTube. Your Gmail contacts and telephone contacts are treated separately. You can add contacts from your phone to YouTube.
Start A YouTube Chat Thread
Tap a contact on the sharing sheet to send them the video. If you want to add a contact from your phone, scroll to the end of the suggested contacts and tap “Add contacts”. Allow the YouTube app to access your contacts, then select a contact to share the video. When you share a video with a contact, a YouTube chat thread is started.
When you share a video with a contact, send them a request. The person must approve this request to start the conversation.
As mentioned above, the YouTube app does not contain any “Chat” or “Messages” tab. To start a conversation, you need to share a video, but what if you want to get back to it? Apparently, the user interface has no way to do it, but it is there, just badly designed.
In the YouTube app, go to the Activity tab. Here you can see all chat threads and contact requests. Tap a contact and start chatting. The app has a group chat so you can add more than one person to a discussion. Tap the overflow button at the top of a discussion and tap “Add Participants” in the menu. If you wish, you can delete a thread or simply mute notifications.
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The elephant in the room
It must be said; No one requested this feature. The comment section is one of the worst places for online speeches. It’s so terrible that popular and seemingly innocent YouTube channels like the TED channel should disable comments for some of their videos. The live chat presented along with the live videos is just as terrible and is often full of robots. Does YouTube believe that these conversations will be better simply because users have them with contacts? Do people really need to have full conversations on a video and can’t have them in other chat apps? Viber now allows users to search and send a YouTube video without leaving the app. This function does not make sense for the most part. You end up having to re-add your contacts and random strangers can send you a request if they have your email.
