YouTube ranks “wholesome and funny” comments higher?

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1487982804784726018

by ipsum2 • 4 years ago

119 161 4 years ago

twitter.com

ipsum2• 4 years ago

URL should point to https://twitter.com/nikhilbd/status/1488027319935537153, not the archived version.

seattle_spring2• 4 years ago

Why? The archive version is much easier to access without an account.

pvg• 4 years ago

It's in the guidelines - use the original source, workarounds to soft restrictions are typically posted in thread.

_yoqn2• 4 years ago

Tweets can be and are deleted. Archives make sense in this case.

dang2• 4 years ago

In deleted cases, yes, but not in advance. We love archives (and archive.org most of all), but archive links shouldn't be used as submission URLs when an original is available. For one thing, it's important for the original domain to be displayed.

Of course it's always fine to link to an archived copy from the comments, and we intend eventually to build software support for this.

dang2• 4 years ago

We changed to the original tweet in the thread. Submitted URL was https://web.archive.org/web/20220131130754/https://twitter.c.... Thanks!

uejfiweun2• 4 years ago

Whatever these folks at YouTube are doing with the comments section, they're doing a great job. I really enjoy YouTube comments - I check them for every video I watch, and I often get more laughs from the comments than I do from the actual video! Would love to know more details about how this is implemented. I assume it's some sort of massively scalable NLP & ML system?

RankingMember4• 4 years ago

Wow, I want whatever YouTube's giving you. The comments I see are the same joke over and over again and/or those horrible people that drag politics into every conversation.

tragictrash• 4 years ago

Yeah this is my experience. Totally the opposite. Just people disrespecting and arguing in the comments section about nothing.

jandrese• 4 years ago

Grandparent post is nuts. Youtube comments are mostly full of repetitive jokes in the current meme formats. Sometimes there is a quality contribution, but it probably won't be near the top.

This does vary by channel of course, but if you're talking about a popular channel that shows up for non-logged in users like LockPicking Lawyer then the comments will consist of the same tired and lame but highly upvoted jokes in every thread. Maybe if you scroll down far enough you'll get an anecdote about the company that manufactured the lock or something, but never above the "lol, it just falls apart when LPL looks in its direction!" comments.

mdoms• 4 years ago

Agree completely. If it's not the same stupid inside joke over and over again it's wholesome but contentless "Great video thanks for posting" stuff.

oblio4• 4 years ago

Well, I remember going through Youtube comments across the years. Now they're slightly bad but at the start they had no moderation.

I've been on various internet forums across the years and also on IRC.

I've haven't been on 4chan or whatever that thing is called, I think it's meant to be a completely unmoderated forum?

In any case, forums ranged from horrible to amazing. IRC, same.

The original, totally unmoderated version of Youtube comments was the worst dumpster fire I've ever seen. Stupidity, hate, racism, you name it, it was there. It probably had one of the worst communities in the history of communities.

Then about 5 (10?) years ago they added some kind of ranking system that improved things. It went from being maybe the worst mainstream community on the planet to somewhere in the bottom 100, I'd say. Quite an improvement :-))

So if they improved it again, maybe they'll reach Reddit main subreddits levels soon :-p

uejfiweun2• 4 years ago

I suppose an important variable is what kind of content the algorithm recommends to you. In my recommendeds I mostly get clips from my favorite shows, funny prank videos, some cool informative stuff like Kurzgesagt, food content, and video game content. I'd guess that if you venture into the news / politics realm, the comments degrade accordingly, but I purposely try not to watch that stuff so I'm not sure.

Fricken• 4 years ago

The last time I made a deliberate effort to read a YouTube comment was, I think, sometime around 2007.

hyperhopper• 4 years ago

It really depends massively on the videos, for some engineering videos I see comments that are insightful or make me die laughing. Though for other things that I would guess are for a similar demographic, like lock picking lawyer, every comment there could be the same for every other LPL video "click on 3, 2 is binding" jokes, comments on how it's never a fluke, comments on how fast he opens it or how bad the lock is, etc

CactusOnFire• 4 years ago

My usual experience is that the top rated post is either insightful or a chuckle, but if you delve into the child comments from that particular post, or any more than a couple down, and it is an outright flame war over something trivial.

steelstraw• 4 years ago

I agree, they're often surprisingly funny and witty. To take a random example, I just looked at the comments of Lex's recent interview with Elon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxREm3s1scA) and saw:

"This is the best conversation between two robots that I’ve ever witnessed."

The other top comments are just friendly and positive.

3np3• 4 years ago

I recently, for no particular reason, have been watching some of the top videos on YT over a couple of months.

I noticed many (most?) of the top comments are made by accounts that on a closer look are promoting or even selling what must be some kind of scam or MLM. Would be fair to call them submarine comments.

Several of them were even verbatim duplicates of other comments on the same video. I got the feeling that a lot of this is automated, and not by the people supposed to be running the platform.

Just open up the YT front page in a clean unpersonalized session and go into those Minecraft/Fortnite/whatever that tend to end up high in the rankings and you’ll probably see what I mean.

dpark5• 4 years ago

Several of them were even verbatim duplicates of other comments on the same video.

I don’t know how many of these are robots vs knowing karma whores, but it’s definitely a pervasive problem.

drusepth2• 4 years ago

I have the same experience. Most of the stuff I watch [1] is a lot less "meme-y" than I imagine the typical YouTube video, but I almost always check the comments and find either useful and/or funny comments.

It's a loooong way away from the comment section of just a few years ago, which was almost always full of rage, poorly-written comments, politics, and inside jokes.

[1] Sample of my homepage: https://i.imgur.com/IrmWii4.png

Karsteski• 4 years ago

I admire the sarcasm

badRNG• 4 years ago

There were a number of years where I would have been happy if YouTube just removed the comment section. The "culture" of comments in the early '10s is reminiscent of what you find today on sites like 4chan. Scrolling down to the comments could truthfully be a deeply upsetting experience that can offset the value provided by whatever you were watching.

"Don't read the YouTube comments" was a common phrase, and for good reason. Nowadays, I wouldn't say YouTube comments are especially funny or insightful, but they are certainly tolerable. I imagine having a list of epithets, slurs, and phrases (and accounts that use them) to de-rank would have gone far enough to help fix the nightmare that was the comment section.

tentacleuno• 4 years ago

Nowadays, I wouldn't say YouTube comments are especially funny or insightful

I find that a lot of them are something like 'lol', or 'love the way X did Y' / an unfunny meme (with thousands of thumbs ups) / something else along those lines. I find myself scrolling quite a long way to find anything insightful about what I watched, and just for something I can take with me in general.

jlack• 4 years ago

I think it depends on the niche of the particular video. I've found channels like woodworking/machining have insightful comments from professionals in that field which may have alternate solutions or point out why something is done a certain way.

lovehashbrowns• 4 years ago

That has to depend a lot on the content you watch. I did a mini test with three videos I found on my list to test this out:

The only video I found that sorta matches this is Chanel 5's ComplexCon video: https://youtu.be/jy9x09iCATA which has mostly meme replies.

Mentour Pilot made a video about a 747 crash https://youtu.be/Y50saxfTqQA and the top reply is from a pilot with a lot of the other replies being from pilots as well.

And the last video I looked at was one titled "All 8 Species of Bear" https://youtu.be/7DERN0R3AbM which I thought would definitely have trash comments because it seemed to be from one of those "Top #" click bait channels. But the top replies are bear stories, species information, and some zoologists. No idea how accurate the info is, however.

RankingMember4• 4 years ago

I think a lot of the improvement is also old-guard media companies realizing they don't have to leave comments turned on for their livestreams and video uploads. Those comment sections were invariably absolute sewers of the worst of the worst commentary.

The livestreams were particularly bad because there'd be a comment box live-updating at breakneck pace right next to the video. I recall a description of the livestream of that SpaceX launch of the Tesla Roadster into space that was particularly striking- Here's this placid video feed of Starman calmly floating through space after escaping planet Earth juxtaposed with the incoherent screeching of the millions of angry apes stuck on it.

guerrilla7• 4 years ago

Maybe the problem isn't technological and there's something wrong with society and we should start focusing on that.

TulliusCicero12• 4 years ago

No, the problem is absolutely technological. Easily getting huge visibility with anonymity and no one gatekeeping you was a much more limited thing prior to internet.

ninkendo• 4 years ago

As someone who watches YouTube pretty much exclusively on Apple TV, I find all this discussion around YouTube comments interesting, since I’ve almost never read a YouTube comment (at least not in the past 10 years or so.)

I will say that I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on much not seeing them.

tus666• 4 years ago

Sounds like bread-and-butter kind of machine learning stuff to me.

paulpauper• 4 years ago

youtube comments are so heavily censored it's crazy. Tons of ghosting going on.

thirteenfingers• 4 years ago

Indeed. Just last week there was a whole thread here on HN about the problems with toxicity detectors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066720 I'm not sure if this is the system youtube is using, but it would certainly align with my experience where people have left innocuous comments on my videos that disappear a couple hours later - comments such as "this music is beautiful, damn" where the only thing I can think of, short of that user's entire account getting deactivated, is that the word "damn" tripped some sort of toxicity flag.

I hate bullies as much as the next person on HN, but I'm deeply unsettled by youtube's recent efforts in the direction of manufacturing consent.

bliteben3• 4 years ago

I don't understand how they don't expect a first amendment case against them, they likely are discriminating against certain ethnicities, races, or localities in using algorithms to block / sort comments. It seems like at some point all automated moderation like this will have to be reviewable.

On the other hand it is nice that their comment section isn't as toxic as it once was.

fallingknife• 4 years ago

There is no first amendment right to have your comment visible on Youtube. In fact, Youtube has the first amendment right to show whatever comments they want. They could even have fake accounts that post positive comments and upvotes, and charge users money for artificial engagement. Google executives could decide that they wanted to support literal Nazis, and promote their videos, add fake likes and engagements, and do the opposite to any opposing political views. This would all be perfectly legal.

We have restricted the constitutional rights of corporations in other cases e.g. utilities, though. And we can do it again.

kube-system• 4 years ago

Because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are a governmental founding document and only apply to the government. Alphabet is not part of the government, and therefore, it does not apply.

Discrimination by companies toward the public is covered mainly by Civil Rights Act (or the Americans with Disabilities Act in the case of discrimination based on disability).

TulliusCicero12• 4 years ago

A first amendment case based on what? They're not the government.

seattle_spring2• 4 years ago

What types of comments are being censored? A lot of people claim HN is heavily censored, but when you turn on "showdead" it reveals mostly truly vile and awful comments are the ones hidden.

climb_stealth• 4 years ago

Profanity seems to do it. Even in a positive context. I have had it happen recently where I added a comment but it never made it into the comments. There was no error.

There may have been the word shit in my comment. But it was polite and constructive. Meh. Makes me not want to bother and I don't.

elcapitan• 4 years ago

While I think this may be helpful for the larger part of Youtube that is just entertainment, I find that in many parts where I'm looking for concrete information (like introductory talks on a topic, lectures etc), the "community" part is often not very helpful - if I can't see critical comments early or see the "thumbs up to down" ratio (which has been changed recently apparently to just show "up"), it's harder for me to judge whether I really want to invest 20-60 minutes into watching the video. So I end up just skipping through the video trying to get a first impression of what the quality is.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

So I end up just skipping through the video trying to get a first impression of what the quality is.

while this might seem annoying when one is used to the up/down vote mechanism I honestly think incentivizing people to check content for themselves is a significant improvement.

I think a lot of websites should remove signals and tone down recommender systems in favor of making people just watch or read. It's one of the things I still like about HN. The greyed out downvoted comments and order aside there's no real visual cues or gamified mechanisms here.

bradlys• 4 years ago

How often are you actually looking for information on YouTube? This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say removing the up to down ratio was a good thing.

I installed addons so I could see the ratio before I even clicked on the video. It’s saved me so much time. (Unfortunately it only worked on YouTube so when I searched on Google I still stumbled onto bad videos and wasted a lot of time)

simonsarris• 4 years ago

Especially things like wood-working and chain-sawing videos. Downvotes and critical comments are key if you want to keep your fingers and your head.

tablespoon• 4 years ago

Especially things like wood-working and chain-sawing videos. Downvotes and critical comments are key if you want to keep your fingers and your head.

Yeah. In an ideal world "howto videos for dangerous activities" or even just "howto videos in general" would have very special policies applied to them. There's a lot of people who have no idea what they're talking about who like to make howto videos, and it's super important to surface critical information about those.

Which is a good demonstration of one of the fundamental problems of trying to make a general content-agnostic distribution platform. A general platform run according to contemporary business practices will tend towards one-size-fits-all policies, but that works about as well as one-size-fits-all pants.

analyst74• 4 years ago

I was skeptical about removing dislikes at first. But the more I think about it, the more I admire the decision.

It's slightly inconveniencing the majority in order to protect the minority from harassment. If anything, it shows YouTube has the balls to do what's unpopular.

sudosysgen• 4 years ago

That's certainly true. However, I really miss dislikes for tutorial. If I'm repairing a sensitive piece of equipment, dislikes are useful to cut out the noise from the signal.

Octabrain• 4 years ago

I honestly think that the reason Youtube gave for removing dislikes based on their will to protect “the minority” from harassment is plain BS. I personally don’t see anything brave on it. IMO There are much clever and better mechanisms YouTube could have implemented to prevent that claimed “harassment protection”: What about requiring the user to watch certain proportion of the video in order to allow to like/dislike it? What about doing a better job detecting and purging bot accounts? What about improving the feedback loop from the user when he/she dislikes the video? What about improving the shitshow that is the copyright violation claim system which is something that truly kills many minor channels?

If anything, it is the most lazy measure they could came up with, but even with that, I simply don’t buy it and I suspect the reasons behind are others.

dannyobrien• 4 years ago

I'd really like to know more about this -- the replies to the original question were divided between people commenting about how much better the comments were, and people talking about better tooling and empowerment being granted to large YT creators.

My instinct is that the progress has been primarily because of the better tooling and moderation capabilities, just because the larger companies always promise that ML will take care of their large-scale moderation processes without much concrete evidence. But I also suspect that the answer is somewhere between the two approaches, and it would be great if YT were able to improve the wider ecosystem by sharing some of their strategies.

gpt52• 4 years ago

I’d argue that YouTube simply implemented a Reddit like sorting mechanism.The top comments on a YouTube video are very similar to Reddit.

When you optimize for engagement (e.g. Facebook’s sorting), you get toxicity. When you optimize for approval, you get funny and wholesome stuff.

TremendousJudge5• 4 years ago

Reddit top comments are notorious for usually bashing the original post or pointing out how it's wrong. It's a very common trope for there being a super upvoted front page story, and for the first comment to be "actually this is false/incorrect/incomplete/somehow a lie". This basically never happens on Youtube comments.

coolso2• 4 years ago

Is that why all YouTube comments are exactly the same now? It’s like the top of every major subreddit post’s comment section. It’s almost as if you’re witnessing 14 year olds discover the internet and humor, but over and over again on a daily basis.

The homogeneity of the internet is becoming so tiresome.

Spivak2• 4 years ago

You could utter this exact statement every day since 1995.

You’re also trapped in your own eternal September, doomed to remember your own personal “early” internet as being so much better because it was all new to you despite the fact that it was someone else’s “oh my god it’s all the same now.”

guerrilla7• 4 years ago

This makes a mistake of forgetting the part where none of this was new to us yet this homogenization and sterilization hadn't happened yet.

coolso2• 4 years ago

You could utter this exact statement every day since 1995.

No you couldn't. Because back then, even 10-15 years after 1995, not everyone went to the same 3 websites, and there were more than 3 companies on the web that owned everything. Furthermore, there was no concept of upvotes and downvotes to literally encourage crafting your comments to appeal to the widest audience / lowest common denominator. (This concept is no longer specific to Reddit by the way; nearly every comment section on every website utilizes the same type of deal.)

Back then if you wanted to speak your mind or say something, you could just type it out and everyone would see it. Today, if you want to say something, you need to craft your comment in such a way to make it worth it: sure, you could say exactly what you want. But that might only get one upvote. Or, God forbid, it might get downvoted! Then nobody sees it; furthermore, the rating your receive could potentially work against you and make the hivemind turn further against your argument. Because lots of people downvoted it. Or not many people upvoted it. Which means it's bad / not good.

It's a perverse incentive. The result is... usually, milquetoast homogeneous repetition.

pwdisswordfish9• 4 years ago

1995 people: what’s a subreddit?

GaylordTuring• 4 years ago

Nobody:

Absolutely nobody:

OP: I'm TiReD oF THe SamE joKEs!1!

(On a serious note, I totally agree with you.)

3np3• 4 years ago

I lever understood how this meme-format is even supposed to be read/interpreted.

  Nobody:
  X: Y

What are you trying to convey here?

Leary• 4 years ago

Maybe they overweighs downvotes, thus pushing only uncontroversial comments up.

jack_riminton• 4 years ago

Occam's razor says it's probably something very simple like that

RankingMember4• 4 years ago

I'd be interested to know if that's the case, as it'd present a shift from their long-held strategy of having the comment downvote button do absolutely nothing.

phailhaus• 4 years ago

it'd present a shift from their long-held strategy of having the comment downvote button do absolutely nothing.

This seems to be a common refrain, despite little evidence to back it up. Just because the dislike button doesn't render a count doesn't mean that it isn't being counted and used to weight comments.

drdeca• 4 years ago

seeing as the downvotes on comments aren't shown anywhere, that would surprise me a little

RedBeetDeadpool12• 4 years ago

There seems to be some perverted notion that "wholesome and funny" is somehow better. Its not. Its manipulative and a case of "I know whats good for you" that can only result when someone thinks they are actually better than you.

These aren't people making the things "wholesome and funny". They are criminals in teddy bear outfits controlling what people hear. Modern day clowns.

Arainach• 4 years ago

Have you seen YouTube comments circa 2006-2019 (no idea when this change was implemented, I gave up on reading the comments long ago)? Some of the worst toxicity of the entire Internet. 4chan at least had some funny parts, YT comments were just awful. This isn't censorship, it's trying to build an experience that doesn't actively turn people away from your platform.

serf• 4 years ago

This isn't censorship, it's trying to build an experience that doesn't actively turn people away from your platform.

i'm here to tell you that the cutesy shit drives certain people away.

'Funny' isn't some objective quality that things can be neatly sorted into with any level of accuracy, except in cases of the worst most generic/juvenile types of humor that are guaranteed to get a chuckle from 'some idiot' out there.

The parody show 'Ow! My Balls!' in the movie 'Idiocracy' comes to mind.

RedBeetDeadpool12• 4 years ago

2006-2019

I believe this was when youtube was growing.

it's trying to build an experience that doesn't actively turn people away

I believe youtube was growing at this time.

I personally don't remember it being that toxic. But even if it were whose responsibility should it be to deal with the toxicity? The platform's or the content creator's?

There's a saying that's oft repeated "dont read the comments section". That's a strategy in line with the approach I'd endorse. We shouldn't be censoring information just because its "toxic", people need to find ways to withstand or ignore or deal with the criticism that exists in the world.

People develop weak immune systems if they are protected from everything, it's not just a biological thing. The American mind is as coddled as their biological immune system. We should be teaching people how to deal and withstand criticism whether valid or caustic. Otherwise we get this mad world where no one can offend anyone and you can't even tell clinically obese people their body is not healthy.

kupopuffs• 4 years ago

I remember Old Youtube. It was disgusting and vile and I've never heard of more human hatred over the smallest things TBH

shadowgovt5• 4 years ago

I remember when G+ tried to consume YouTube comments.

My immediate reaction was "You could... But why do you want to? In what scenario is it going to benefit your fledgling social network to chug toxic waste?"

... apparently, it didn't.

Spivak2• 4 years ago

You have it framed backwards It’s that “angry, mean, and toxic” are bad and the reason YT comments are a meme for their low quality. And then combine with the fact that “neutral” comments are boring you get “positive, funny, wholesome” as natural candidates for what should rise to the top.

It’s a no-win if you demand that comments go largely unmoderated. Because we had that and it made them genuinely useless to the point where creators turned them off and people installed add-ons to remove them.

RedBeetDeadpool12• 4 years ago

we had that and it made them genuinely useless

That's better than one that is useful, but useful for only one affiliation.

frakkingcylons• 4 years ago

You say this as if the comment section used to be some oasis of invigorating debate among reasonable people.

I find the wholesome and funny comments to be relatively uninteresting and dull 90% of the time, but it’s leaps and bounds better than the unmitigated angry mud slinging that used to be there.

TulliusCicero12• 4 years ago

Are you serious? Old Youtube comments were the dumbest, vilest shit. This was commonly understood and accepted across the internet. Almost anything would be an improvement from that.

TremendousJudge5• 4 years ago

For a document from this time pointing this out, see https://xkcd.com/202/ (from 2006) and https://xkcd.com/481/ (from 2008)

Jeema101• 4 years ago

It's fine if you think that attempting to remove toxic content amounts to censorship - you have a right to that opinion - but it doesn't change the fact that the toxicity itself still exists. But are you also angry at the people in society who create that toxicity or just the people trying to control it?

RedBeetDeadpool12• 4 years ago

I'm not angry at either. The people trying to control it are just doing the most logical thing to create a happy place. But my position is that that is an elementary mistake, like never letting your child play outside. I'm saying some level of toxicity is better than none. Have you ever been part of an organization where people are not allowed to disagree? Rhetorical question.

Another analogy is that we need to have managed forest fires, instead of trying to quash every little fire at every turn which only results in a catastrophic blaze when one turns up that is out of control.

sundarurfriend• 4 years ago

And what can be more wholesome than praising the Supreme Leader! (Or perhaps praising Supreme™!)

Sorry about the flippant tone, but I hope we've learned that any system like this operating behind closed doors can be and will be used for manipulation and (much more direct) profit-seeking.

And even before that happens, the idea itself is full of cultural bias, and so brings in cultural discrimination and the imposition of one culture's idea of wholesome/funny on the whole world, by its very nature.

TulliusCicero12• 4 years ago

Okay, but the previous status quo was abominable. "Don't read the youtube comments" was a well understood internet meme for a reason.

This is a massive improvement on what came before. Maybe it could be better yet, but I haven't seen anything better myself for websites in a similar situation.

marginalia_nu3• 4 years ago

Maybe Youtube just shouldn't have comments? Thinking about it, you're not really going to get discussions on a platform like that.

Likes and similar, fine. Maybe evolve that. Maybe do the whole Dark Souls thing where you can only leave gestures and stock messages. Sure, you'll still get "try finger, but hole" and "amazing chest ahead", but that's still streets ahead of Youtube's communication.

impalallama• 4 years ago

i hate to assume they don't weigh endless replies as much as other social media platforms out there, (100+ comment reply chains is a pretty big sign at something not being wholesome)

dpark5• 4 years ago

That’s a good observation. long reply chains do tend to turn to garbage rapidly. Either it’s an “in joke” meme chain (like used to consume nearly all Reddit threads) or it’s an argument. Which kind of makes sense because YouTube comments are a poor venue for valuable back and forth discussions so it’s just going to be garbage driving back and forth.

skilled• 4 years ago

I’ve always disliked YT comments. It’s either one liners or verified people pretending like they like the video.

tomcam• 4 years ago

How do you know they're pretending?

Jowsey• 4 years ago

It's a whole thing. People buy verified channels, rebrand into some easy-to-recognise username/avatar, and take advantage of this phenomenon (?) to boost their numbers with so much attention due to posting wholesome comments and always being at the top of the comments list. MrBeast's comments sections are a great example of this. Nothing but verified accounts with short names posting copy/pasted compliments with too many likes.

MonaroVXR• 4 years ago

On coding videos; "This video is soo good, thank you for the explanation"

bpodgursky3• 4 years ago

I think dumb people are just nicer than smart people.

guerrilla7• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: Fascists are extremely dumb and not nice.

bpodgursky3• 4 years ago

Fascists are wrong, but I don't think they are particularly dumb on average when compared to other fringe ideologies.

etchalon• 4 years ago

There are fewer people meaner than a dumb person who thinks they're smart.

zionic• 4 years ago

Might that be evolutionary?

If you’re stupid and can’t provide for yourself pissing others off is a quick way to starve.

bpodgursky3• 4 years ago

Maybe. Mostly I think smart people spend a lot of time trying to be dicks in the most clever way possible, especially on social media.

stnikolauswagne• 4 years ago

Idk, being incredibly toxic and/or racist online doesn‘t seem particularly smart to me, in the case of getting doxed or caught on social media at work I would rather defend my questionable taste in music and hobbies to my boss rather than actual vile or racist comments.

oblib• 4 years ago

I think it depends on what you're watching. Political stuff can tend to have comments that get pretty snarky whereas lighter entertainment oriented content would obviously tend to get more "thumbs up" and humorous comments.

From there it's probably fair to say that way more younger people watch lighter stuff than oldsters there, and there are probably a lot more younger folks using YouTube than oldsters.

edpichler• 4 years ago

Once we learn how the algorithm rules works, the game changes.

andrewclunn• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who misses ALL CAPS RAGE COMMENTS and horibly mispelled wrod sallad comments? Oh, and remember link comments? And what about those ascii art ones that you had to click on "see more" to get the full effect from? Oh or how about, substantive comments that disagreed with the the content of the video? Yeah, those were great, back before every video was watched mainly by subscribers who would become the echo chamber for content creators, even if they and YouTube mods (see the algorithm) didn't purge you first. Yeah, YouTube comments are great if you never want to be challenged by anything.

causi• 4 years ago

Youtube started being a corporatized content farm the day they removed video replies.

TremendousJudge5• 4 years ago

I only remember video replies as a feature that allowed spammer camgirls to show their face on the related video feed

corobo• 4 years ago

video replies were a corporatized content farm themselves tbf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl

bloodyplonker22• 4 years ago

I feel your rage, but wait until you read Reddit comments.

scrollaway2• 4 years ago

Sorry, are we playing the same universe? Youtube comments used to famously be the "worst of the worst", and the example you'd give to people if you wanted them to lose their faith in the internet.

robrenaud• 4 years ago

I am pretty sure OP was sarcastic and you missed it over text.

SuoDuanDao• 4 years ago

You can still sort by chronological... it's not the same, but it helps remember what was lost.

osrec• 4 years ago

That explains why every Indian or Pakistani music video has this sort of comment at the top with a few thousand likes:

"I'm Indian/Pakistani, but hats off to Pakistan/India for creating this masterpiece. Music unites us all. Love to my brothers in Pakistan/India".

I mean, I appreciate the sentiment, but it feels odd that it's expressed in the comments section of a random YouTube video!

Another weird sort of comment is:

"May your loved one be blessed and live a hundred years. One like = one blessing."

Again, an embarrassingly high number of likes. Do people actually think a YouTube "like" is going to generate a blessing for them?!

rPlayer65542• 4 years ago

Again, an embarrassingly high number of likes. Do people actually think a YouTube "like" is going to generate a blessing for them?!

You never know! Like this comment to get like blessing insurance. Like some of my other posts to get higher coverage. We protect you from bad luck from not liking posts.

TehShrike• 4 years ago

I upvoted this comment just in case

not2b• 4 years ago

I like what they've been doing; a couple of years ago the YouTube comment section was toxic, now it's actually pleasant to read. Does this mean that some relevant criticism might get downvoted? Perhaps, but probably not if it is well written and worded politely.

0xedd2• 4 years ago

Use Odysee

YouTube ranks “wholesome and funny” comments higher?

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