It seems obvious to me the overall experience of youtube comments is much more dependent on youtube's choices than people's behaviors.
That's just not how people work.
(This is different than other things like online reviews for products which are more biased towards negative experiences.)
I've noticed it for the last couple years too.
There is heavy censorship on interactivity in most web apps today. Searching is restricted, discussion is restricted and viewing other discussions is restricted. Restricted by YouTube's bias.
If this is what's actually happening, it's a case of particularly nasty commenters ruining it for everybody.
No privacy, censoring, coercion and an artificial image of "happiness" everywhere, just like on the facade of North Korea's buildings (or the smile on Joker's face).
There's a reason why youtube comments are echo chambers of "happiness for the video". It's like Reddit, where you are writing comments to pass the hive mind filter. Welcome to modern communal interactions, where having a valid or invalid opinion is bad only because it is different.
On the flip side, for some (usually the same) topics it’s easy to write banal karma-fishing comments sure to rise to the top of the thread. At least HN has a time-decay aspect on those.
YouTube comment section is basically a cesspool of toxic positivity now, with absolutely no informational value at all.
I feel like this has been the case for a couple of years now, where nothing even slightly critical will be surfaced by whatever automated algorithm they are using to filter/boost content.
While objectivity and truth are both good, the way how people phrase things can sometimes come across as quite mean spirited, almost like an attack on someone else. This is probably in part because there absolutely are people online who actually enjoy posting vile comments and hurting others, so many have their guard up. Ergo, more luck can be had when phrasing things constructively or without a tone that might even accidentally appear dismissive.
> There's a reason why youtube comments are echo chambers of "happiness for the video". It's like Reddit, where you are writing comments to pass the hive mind filter. Welcome to modern communal interactions, where having a valid or invalid opinion is bad only because it is different.
I'll even go as far as to admit that in my eyes this is for the better. Recently someone from LTT came out as trans and many of the comments initially were just painful to read. Lots of attempts at being as hurtful as possible and just horrible rhetoric, that not only adds nothing to the conversation, but also brings down the mood of everyone. But revisiting the video now, most of the comments are far more civil and the vile things have mostly been purged, reading the comments now doesn't hurt.
It's probably quite hard to find a middle ground between being too aggressive or lax with moderation and the degree of this will vary between different communities - what sentiments are okay, what jokes are acceptable, what rhetoric can be used. My hopes are that Internet and the various popular communities will remain humane, while still allowing for discussions and disagreement about most topics.
I think that HN typically finds a decent balance: people can have disagreements without getting too uncivil and it's kept that way. I remember discussions about WFH and someone who told me to "get cancer and die" got flagged and more or less removed from the discussion, because that didn't contribute anything.
Yes, the comments system is being heavily biased and that is great. People might not remember but youtube comment section was about the most toxic place invented by humans. It was so bad I don't think anyone thought it could be salvaged.
This is probably googles biggest achievement of late. Hardly perfect, but it truly have changed many millions of lives for the better.
But no, it is not and never has been a good place for discussions. Unfortunate, yes, but this is so much better than anyone could have hoped for.
It's always the same "how can I contact u" "circuit diagram and code pls" "what is x project cost" <--- important for these countries. So many EE students in places just ripping off other people's projects & the uni doesn't know better or care aha
At first when I found a video where every visible comment was “Omg! I’ve tried everything for years, and this is the first thing that worked. You’ve changed my life”, I was excited! Now, I realise that almost every physical therapy video contains the exact same comments. Presumably because they are the ones the algorithm pushes to the top.
This means it’s really hard to know which content is actually trustworthy, especially when there’s also no downvotes. And for a lot of thing this is really important.
It’s as if Amazon showed only the glowing five star reviews - suddenly you don’t know what the common problems are with the product you’re about to buy.