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Comment by micah94 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I thought this was going to be a discussion of how Google/Youtube was manipulating the comments. But it was merely about some silly bots fooling a bunch of kids. Youtube is never going to do anything about that. They prefer the "Community Guideline Strike" Hammer or take down your channel completely. They can disable comments completely (if they want to) or change them here and there. I've seen complaints about this but it's hard to prove. But we've all probably seen videos with COMMENTS HAVE BEEN DISABLED (and not by the owner). They WANT you to be manipulated by the comments on channels they allow. This guy is completely missing the boat here...

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Author here--it sounds like you're talking about YouTube banning comments on certain videos? If you're talking about YouTube changing the content or social proof on individual comments, that sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

I dislike how people use "conspiracy theory" so dismissively these days. They were likely referring to what was shown in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptiWBrd9YbQ.

Hmm, I can't watch the video. "We are experiencing problems with our servers. Please try again later."

EDIT: Was able to watch it. This looks like a bug more than anything.

I strongly doubt that this is some kind of active modification and not an error.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That Google is editing people's comments, and that's the real problem?

I thought the article was insightful and brought up a relevant issue, and I'm not sure what boat you claim it's missed.

I believe the real issue is Google itself manipulating the comments for their own ends -- to make money and market to you. Bots fooling kids is not something they care about.

I doubt there is any conspiracy here, Google is unlikely to be manipulating the comments themselves.

This is likely just simple incentives:

- Google uses comment count as a measure of video engagement

- Monetization is based on engagement

- Content producers are therefore incentivized to generate comments

- Controversy is great at generating comments, so content producers get creative

Yeah that's the part I don't get: how is Google "manipulating" the comments?

And the article is not about kids; if you made it to the end you'd see implications for e.g. the November midterms in the U.S.

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