Please explain how YouTube's new comment system works.?

Anybody who been to YouTube within the last 24 hours has noticed a major change to the comments section. You can't write comments and there's no comments to read. Instead you get a pop up window telling you the benefits of a new system involving Google Plus. All morning I have been trying to figure out how this works. One video said I needed to open a Google Plus account in order to read and write comments. I attempted to do this and found out I already have a Google Plus account. Yet, I'm still unable to write or read any comments. Am I supposed to go to another website to leave comments? That makes absolutely no sense. I thought the objective of technology was to make things easier, not more difficult.

Can somebody out there explain in simple terminology how this new system works? Regardless of how it works, YouTube is doing a piss-poor job of keeping its users informed. They're getting to be almost as bad as Yahoo Answers which also doesn't understand the premise of "If it ain't broken, don't fix it!"