YouTube comment sections are weirdly positive always. It could be a video of some horrible crime and the comments will be about how great the channel is and encouraging the channel to keep making more videos. When j visit actual fan pages anywhere else online there are always a mix of opinions. But youtube is constantly full of obsequious people
YouTube comment sections are weirdly positive always.
Sounds like it has changed since I last looked
One word: bots
I don’t think so really. Google accounts are pretty hard to bot. I think they’re just idiots and children and with Poe’s law you can’t really tell the difference.
Google accounts are hard to bot.
Not to google itself. They might use those bots to create fake engagement, like on reddit. We can never prove if google is doing it or not, but they would certainly benefit from doing so.
The conspiracies never end with you people…
Star people?
I knew it! Aliens!
Google accounts are pretty hard to bot
If you do a quick search you can find sites selling google accounts in bulk at prices ranging from a few cents to a couple dollars a piece, depending on the account attributes. I guess SMS-verified accounts with a US phone number costing over a dollar might constitute “hard to bot”, but spammers don’t need one of those to comment on youtube.
That’s usually from credential stuffing, which I guess you could consider botting, but what I was referring to was automatically creating accounts. Sorry for the miscommunication.
I believe the channel is able to hide comments and basically gets rid of any negative ones.
I think this only applies to popular channels, I’ve noticed this on critikal’s videos, maybe someordinarygamers, but when it comes to smaller channel sizes (around 100k), I see people having discussions about the video’s content more often.
It’s definitely bots that plague more popular creators, but I don’t doubt there’s also people who see these bots getting popular by posting the most generic bot-like messages just to get likes.
Not only can the creator delete comments, but YouTube itself seems to algorithmicly delete comments, especially longer comments.
They also auto delete comments with links, I was doing a tutorial and saw lots of comments asking for help with some issues so I replied to as many as I could.
I reloaded the video later during the day and saw that only some of my comments were visible, I checked the history and saw only some comments were there. Since I had originally written my comments in Notepad++ I saw only the ones with links were removed. You can bypass it by making the link not look like one but it’s annoying if you wish to help people.
Removed by mod
I have the opposite experience. I can’t count how many time I got insulted over a simple opinion
the amount of coments I’ve seen that simply go something like “isnt it amazing that x creator is out here entertaining/educating us for free” is huge. once i saw one video where nearly every comment was like that.
Same, which is why I don’t look at comments. It was funny looking at them a couple years back when it easily turned into fights over mundane shit. But somewhere around the time when people stopped commenting and just started commenting vacuous support was also when the whole thing stopped having aggressive interactions.
Negative comments are purged. I think a lot is done automatically with semantic analysis, but the owners can also delete things. This is why you hear about YouTube comments being a cesspool in the videos, but when you look it’s all bland praise agreeing with whatever brain dead position the video took. They have to read them to delete them.
This is such a weird change that has happened in the last decade or so. I remember the comments on youtube videos being the absolute worst. There were definitely memes about “Youtube comment section being vile”. I think that an improvement in moderation tools, plus a switch to an engagement model (aside from all of the negatives that brought) really changed the culture of commenting on youtube.
Youtube comments are still a meme. Useless vapid nonsense isn’t much better than mean comments. Looking at the YouTube comments section is always a mistake.
Weirdly enough, I see a very similar top comment on a lot of music videos for, it’s always saying how that song was their mom/daughter/wife/loved one’s favorite and how they played it on their funeral or how they would sing it when they were happy before they passed away due to cancer/incurable disease.
I get that it’s a very likely and possible scenario and that people would like to share similar situations but I find it funny how often I see that type of comment.
If I didn’t know better I could be responsible for one of those.
There is literally tens of millions of people dying every year, so it’s not unlikely that over the years thousands of comments gather with stories where a song meant something to one of the millions of dead. It just feels a lot compared to YouTube videos.
YouTube comments don’t really encourage conversation about the content and are largely used nowadays as a way for people to leave messages for the creators. In addition at one point (possibly still ongoing), the YouTube algorithm really responded well to comment engagement so in videos, creators would encourage commenting alongside liking and subscribing.
I think in combination this led to people commenting on the content they watched, which was largely of creators they have fondness,but having nothing to really say, in addition other like-minded people would open the comments and like the positive one, catapulting them to the top.
It must have been about 5-10 years ago that it was standard practice to block YouTube comments because they were so toxic, so it’s interesting how times change.
What you’re describing just sounds like they paid to have a bunch of bots comment and probably like the video.
Most of the time I’ve seen it, it seems to be more of a parasocial relationship. Even documentary channels have often one or more persons associated with the content which people feel close to. Like, you’re posting somewhere where the creator may actually read it. People probably don’t expect a creator to look into the comment section on Reddit or under a news article. But, it’s more likely in their own channel, many content creators encourage that feeling by actually mentioning reading the comments and sometimes even replying in their comment section.
That’s why comments on many youtube videos are more personal (good and bad), because it’s a place where they can direct feedback semi-directly to the creator.
Personally, ther wieredst comments are on SoundCloud
The comments in the early years of YouTube were entirely filled with childish flame wars. I honestly think the only reason that this didn’t kill the site is because they started purging the negativity. Nowadays I’m sure it’s a lot easier for them with the developmental upgrades in bots.
