Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Why not just remove the comment functionality?

https://torrentfreak.com/were-turning-off-the-comments/

https://thehill.com/news/welcome-to-the-new-thehill-com/

https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2017/08/24/5457902...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/editorsblog/facebook-comments-ed-blo...

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-media-social...

https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/what-happened-after-7-news...

http://www.imediaethics.org/msn-quietly-ends-online-comments...

https://www.reuters.com/article/idIN333073846820141107

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo...

My guess is because most of YouTube is not content from agencies and professional news sources as you cite. It's small creators for whom the comments section is their primary source of community engagement and feedback. That's why so many creators tell you to "like, subscribe, and leave a comment". I know it depends on the channel, but I've found the YouTube comments to be often just as quality as the content itself.

YouTubers ask you to leave a comment because they believe that comment engagement is one of the things which results in YouTube recommending your video to people, not because they necessarily care about reading your comments.

For sure, that's definitely part of it. Another big part of it is getting ideas from the comments for new videos to make. This is the "community engagement" part.

I'd rather they didn't. I don't know which videos you watch, but the ones I watch have lots of very helpful and interesting comments.

I've actually been quite impressed at how much improvement there has been compared to a few years ago.

For example in an electrical videos people will call out code violations, exemplary work to be copied, mistakes, tips and ideas, and other things like that.

In superhero clips from movies I've seen people comment with background info from the comics that adds "flavor" to the scenes.

Maybe it's the more "social" videos (family vlogs, personalities, etc) that have bad comments? I don't know, I don't watch too many of those.

I would not be happy without the comments - they help me rate the usefulness and reliability of the info I'm getting from the video, in particular from videos that are outside my expertise.

Marques Brownlee talked about YouTube's current comment problems in a recent video, and touched on why it would be so bad for YouTube to disable comments entirely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y

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