Hacker News Reader

Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

Seconding this -- the comments on machining and electronics videos tend to be great, comments on gaming videos are usually just jokes. This makes intuitive sense to me; different viewer bases who want to see different things.

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.

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

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.

Facebook is not anonymous and has all the same crap. In any case, it's a thing now. And when you shut it down in one place shows up in another. I really do think it's a problem with humans that this stuff just brought to the surface. It was always there with bullying and passive aggressive viciousness and in private conversations everywhere, now it's just in the sunshine. All this stuff is in people's brains. Silencing it isn't going to fix that.

> Also, it's kind of irrelevant to toxicity as Facebook proves since that's not anonymous at all yet you find the same thing.

FB is still really bad, but in my experience it really depends on whether it's arguing with internet randos vs people you're actually friends -- or friends-of-friends -- with. The former is still horrible, but that's because you're nearly anonymous when it comes to someone across the country. I think it's not as bad as some internet comments though, people are more hesitant to say the really blatantly racist or murder-y stuff on something attached to their real name. It still happens, but not as often.

When people are arguing with those they actually know on FB, I find they hold back a lot more. They can still be mean, but they don't go as extreme.

(Sorry rewrote my comment a bit on you but your reply still makes sense)

> When people are arguing with those they actually know on FB, I find they hold back a lot more. They can still be mean, but they don't go as extreme.

This is what I mean by it's a societal/human problem though, that there is something to hold back... I say that is the root of it.

Hmm I guess I agree in a sense. A couple things to keep in mind though:

* Humans largely evolved in small tribes/bands. We just weren't built for communicating with and relating to potentially thousands or millions at a time. Not a surprise then if there are some 'bugs' lurking.

* Even sans the internet, while you may not have had this particular problem, you definitely had some others. I'm reminded of a part of The World Until Yesterday where the author talks about little kids in a non-state tribe spontaneously celebrating around the corpse of an enemy tribe member that had been killed. By modern internet standards, all of those little kids are sociopaths, or maybe the adults that raised them are all sociopaths, because according to many people today, any sort of obvious 'darkness' in human personality, like a tendency for violence, makes you a sociopath. I think the reality is that yeah, parts of our peronalities are fucked up, but that's essentially normal. It may even be a feature, rather than a bug.

Anyway yeah, you could view it as a part of human nature that's just revealed by new technology.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com