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

    • bpalmerau@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Absolutely. Do you remember the herp derp extension that would turn them all into ‘herp derp herp derp’ so that you wouldn’t have to read them?

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I can still remember a time when I would never read any comments at all. It was usually about furious debates, name calling, hate speech etc. You know, pretty much exactly what Twitter is known for.

    • Decoy321@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s what I figured, too. YouTube comments are infamous for being absolute cesspits of the internet. This must be Google’s way to drown them out.

    • cannot@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • starman@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • cujo@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Or a bad actor hoping to draw in vulnerable folks online for their scams, like children.

          More than one YouTube channel has been attacked by folks pretending to be them in the comments of their videos, scamming their viewers out of money. And no matter how obvious the scam seems, it always seems to catch a few people.

          I also know scams will often intentionally use poor grammar or misspell simple things, because they want to catch the kind of person who would overlook those things, like the very naive or the very old, because they’re more likely to get money out of those groups.

          Not saying botting on YouTube isn’t a thing, I just don’t think it’s as prevalent as one might initially think.

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • cannot@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    YouTube comment sections are weirdly positive always.

    Sounds like it has changed since I last looked

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    1 year ago

    Not only can the creator delete comments, but YouTube itself seems to algorithmicly delete comments, especially longer comments.

    • ChiwaWithMujicanoHat@mujico.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • candle_lighter@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • DrQuint@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • dingus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s so utterly bizarre. I don’t generally see comments like this, but there is this one channel that I had been watching recently where every single comment of every video on their channel is like that. Feels like I’m in some sort of weird bizarro world.

  • Ashtear@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Self-selection bias. The YouTube algorithm is very good at showing you things you want to see, so generally speaking, most people who comment are going to like the content. Especially music.

    That said, it’s not all positive everywhere. I assure you Gamer comments can just be as toxic there as they are everywhere else.

    • ElephantInTheRoom@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      When I still used YouTube it recommended me crap I could hardly have cared less about or even things I actually disliked.

      To me, Youtube was always synonymous for faulty algorithms.

      • Lith@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        YouTube recommendations are emblematic of a greater trend I’ve noticed in tech where instead of catering content towards us, we’re starting to be catered towards the content they want to show us. Managing your own subscriptions and keeping the things you don’t want out of your feed just keeps getting harder.

  • Commiunism@lemmy.wtf
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • dan1101@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    YouTube also took steps a few years ago to clean up the comments cesspool.

  • ChiwaWithMujicanoHat@mujico.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Chariotwheel@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • exponential_wizard@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • wewbull@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    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.