I believe the weird comments are the result of toddlers randomly tapping predictive keyboard suggestions on their parent's iPads as they watch the videos. The fact that they hit "post" after typing their nonsense markovian comments is a statistical inevitability given the millions of views of each video.

Though, if one wanted to hide secret messages on YouTube comments, that'd be the place to put them.

Probably not, it was in Thai I believe, and was discovered to decode into strange messages when passed through certain translators and keyboards.

(Maybe there are different types of comments though)

You can decode anything as anything if you are convinced there's a message there and have never heard of a null hypothesis.

I saw some of those threads. The methods of "decoding" they were using were worse than the ones the "Half-Life 3 confirmed" joke is based on.

There are kids using Thai. Why is that an indicator?

Comments are a lot easier to create on a lark as part of a trolling campaign, or intentionally as part of a smear campaign to get these videos taken down, than the videos themselves are. If the videos showed evidence of being a product of the Russian mafia or whoever else spends a lot of money producing CP, I’d be alarmed; as it is, it’s just pseudonymous people tacking their weird two cents onto something.

Whatever you think of the videos, I wouldn’t judge them by their comments—any more than I’d judge an image macro from elsewhere on the Internet by what 4chan does with it.

There are bots, humans and what not exchanging code words and encrypted data in the comments on many of the involved channels. There are thousands "confirmed" channels with many of them having hundreds of videos each, there are hundreds of comments on each video.

The content is clearly managed by a "small" number of individuals. It's dark. I usually don't catch on to conspiracy theories, but there's a lot of data to go on when it comes to this one.

Is there any reason to believe in the encrypted data being exchanged? The conspiracy theory is basically equivalent to saying some groups are running number stations via YouTube comments and that's... silly in many ways.

Sorry. The criminals can already communicate to each other openly on the dark web. There’s no reason for them to exchange coded messages on a YouTube channel. The most probable answer is certainly the simplest: these are garbage comments on garbage videos.

Could be a plausibly deniable way to introduce others, especially non technical people, to your product.