Once the laugh of the internet they are now one of the most wholesome in it. Almost unbelievable for a public site.
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 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.
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, “.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Very thankful for this change, whatever the cause might be :)
On some niche nerd channels the comments are often exceptional and informative. Usually they're at least pleasant or amusing.
(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 !)
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.