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Comment by exo-pla-net | Hacker News Reader

They shadow ban ~100% of comments, unless they detect positive sentiment. If you express any nuance or criticism, poof, your comment is disappeared. What remains is a sea of positive, fully vapid, fully useless comments: an authoritarian dream of milquetoast public discourse.

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I'm a YouTuber with a moderate channel (60k subs). Bad comments are not magically shadow banned, they go into a queue that I have to moderate. The filtering is very good, I never get false positives. Even the really, really nasty ones are there, I just get a warning before I can see them.

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.

I imagine most big YouTubers can’t moderate each comment like that though, so it’s effectively the same as a shadowban in that case

They have teams of people doing it.

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, “.

But links often go there as well

They do. Which means if you don't want your comment to go in the queue on YT, don't post links in comments.

Which really hurts your ability to share information with others, and it doesn’t tell you this anywhere so you can spend ages writing out a comment without realising that no one will ever see it

The problem with human comments are the humans?

still one million times better than what came before.

That's an interesting dilemma between free speech and moderation.

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 prefer to think of it as a meeting where Robert's Rules are followed and enforced vs. an anarchist shouting match.

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.

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