They shadow ban ~100% of comments, unless they detect positive sentiment. If you express any nuance or criticism, poof, your comment is disappeared. What remains is a sea of positive, fully vapid, fully useless comments: an authoritarian dream of milquetoast public discourse.

I'm a YouTuber with a moderate channel (60k subs). Bad comments are not magically shadow banned, they go into a queue that I have to moderate. The filtering is very good, I never get false positives. Even the really, really nasty ones are there, I just get a warning before I can see them.

I can, of course, choose to delete those comments and/or ban that person from commenting on my channel again. I can also choose to approve them.

I imagine most big YouTubers can’t moderate each comment like that though, so it’s effectively the same as a shadowban in that case

They have teams of people doing it.

Comments only go into that queue when certain words are used, and they have to be bad. Well reasoned disagreement never goes in there.

Even just “what you said is dumb, I know better that you” doesn’t go in there

It’s always comments like “f$&@ you, moron, “.

But links often go there as well

They do. Which means if you don't want your comment to go in the queue on YT, don't post links in comments.

Which really hurts your ability to share information with others, and it doesn’t tell you this anywhere so you can spend ages writing out a comment without realising that no one will ever see it

The problem with human comments are the humans?

still one million times better than what came before.

That's an interesting dilemma between free speech and moderation.

I'd also say the current system is better, but losing the dislike button and pushing for positive sentiment can lead to fake positivity which we should beware.

Reminds of the anime "Avatar", where there's an episode featuring a character with an outrageous fake smile who turned out to be sort of a political oppressor.

I prefer to think of it as a meeting where Robert's Rules are followed and enforced vs. an anarchist shouting match.

You call it milquetoast.

I call it pleasant.

Things get done under Robert's Rules, nothing gets accomplished when everyone is yelling "shitcock" at each other in an overwhelming din.

I think the comments have become much worse. Good channels used to have good comment sections where people had normal reasonable discussions about the topic of the video, but these days it seems like nearly every channel's comment section is filled with sycophantic noise, praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance.

Of course I'm not talking about the comment sections of music video channels or provocative video essayers or front page youtubers like pewdiepie. Those were always abominable crap. I mean the small channels of that make niche but thoughtful content, that appeals to people with those niche interests. These sort of channels used to have good comment sections, not the spam and flamewars that people talk about when they say youtube comments were crap. Most of that is gone now, sacrificed for the 'greater good' I guess. The good got ironed out with the bad, and now everything is bland.

Just for instance, railfan videos (e.g. people who watch trains.) The comment sections used to be people giving personal anecdotes about interesting trains they had seen, or their uncle who worked on a similar train, various comments of that nature. Now it's all "Very interesting!", "Another excellent video", "Love these videos, keep them coming", "Great video Danny."

> "...praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance"

Exactly this. Many videos contain a deluge of comments that sound like they came from a praise vending machine.

I watched a short video recently about a gadget review. It was extremely basic, not informative. All the comments mentioned nothing about the topic and instead went into gushing mode, praising the creator with copy-paste lines such as "you deserve more subs" etc. Often from profiles that have no content, and look to be spammer accounts.

Spammer profiles and bots are exploiting the high-ranking "positive but empty comment" in order to increase chances of engagement on their own profile by dominating the "top comments". This is why I switch the sorting to "newest first" to avoid the fake top comments.

> Another great thing about YouTube not mentioned is the quality of comments. Something happened in the last 5 years or so that changed them profoundly.

What videos. I can certainly say some YouTubers attract much better comments, but on average YouTube comments still strikes me as one of the dumbest places on the internet.

OP's point though. The YouTube comments used to be an absolute joke and disaster. I'm sure it came at the cost of some non-insignificant revenue and engagement but there's a model where it works, that Twitter could emulate perhaps (if they cared).

Yes, I have started watching the "how much do you pay for rent in New York (I think there are also other cities but I mostly get nyc videos) and the comments are polite, dare I say kind even.

Very thankful for this change, whatever the cause might be :)

Yeah. They seem to have had problems recently with some very obvious spam bots, but other than that the quality is alright.

On some niche nerd channels the comments are often exceptional and informative. Usually they're at least pleasant or amusing.

I'm fascinated by this. I feel the same way. Do we know if The YouTube team if ordering comments using some sort of sentiment analysis? This might be the key to moderating social media. Is almost like negative/toxic comments are shadow banned and relegated to the bottom of the comments section.

Youtube's system is extremely heavy handed. You can sometimes notice your comments getting shadowbanned if you see the same comment from another account/computer. And I think you can notice it for other people when you get a reply notification, and can even read the comment, but it doesn't show in the comments if you open the list of comments in notifications ?

(Posting multiple comments for the same video seems to be an easy way to get them (shadow)banned. Even more posting links, even when it's literally a timelink to the same video using the mm:so format !)

There was a HN submission on this a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30151021

> Another great thing about YouTube not mentioned is the quality of comments. Something happened in the last 5 years or so that changed them profoundly.

It's not uncommon to get spam from bots trying to impersonate the video creator (same username, same avatar) and trying to push crypto scams everytime one answers a comment. Youtube hardly does anything about it.

The real comments are wholesome but a significant portion of them are obvious scammers. It looks like such an easy problem to solve, they are by accounts that literally post exactly the same comment with a link on loads of videos.

I see masses of bots and dregs in support of authoritarian states.