Doesn't have to even be that complicated. Remember when YouTube comments used to be a dumpster fire?
I'm pretty sure YouTube is doing sentiment analysis on all comments and artificially promoting the ones that tend to be positive.
I'm pretty sure YouTube is doing sentiment analysis on all comments and artificially promoting the ones that tend to be positive.
Anger and other negative emotions are part of the human condition. Suppressing their expression doesn't change the underlying issue that caused the emotion.
Makes YouTube feel more inauthentic and bland.
It's everything. Trying to stifle any of them leads to a bastardized experience.
And YouTube comments used to be more raw and unfiltered than the constantly-promoted rage-bait that has defined Twitter for much of the past decade.
You might want to say “these people should just suck it up” but that’s not a road Google wanted to head down. They see healthy and happy creators as more productive and hence more profitable. Hiding downvotes and sentiment analysis on comments are two ways they can protect creators from this stuff.
I constantly see creators stress over unclear guidelines from YouTube with inconsistent enforcement on what content is or is not allowed or will or will not be monetized.
If YouTube's priority was creators they'd give clearer guidelines to creators and broaden the range of personal expression that can still get ads put on it.
No - YouTube's push for positivity at all costs is to appease investors and media critics who've complained about comments and downvote campaigns and to appease advertisers who were seriously uncomfortable with the media attention given to them during the initial media push for the adpocalypse.
People present an inauthentic vision of themselves in real life. They just limit themselves out of social self-preservation.
They don't do that online, so we need machines to pick up the slack.
In general, anyone can find some reason to criticize even the best things, and if there's one lesson humanity can take from social media it's that negativity and cyber-bullying is contagious. I am completely in favor of YouTube for creating a comment section that I actually enjoy reading; one that enhances the video-watching experience. Not even a single flavenoid of bad taste in my mouth about this.
Whether that filtering is done explicitly or implicitly (i.e. neighborhood wealth)
People suck far more in some environments, online and off, than others.
Which is to say: there's an inherent potential for sucky behaviour, but there are specific circumstances which really seem to amplify and trigger it.
Something like locusts: a behavioural transition of a species under the right environmental stimulus.
Brief (<4m) videos, NatGeo: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=uURqcI08IC4>, also PBS: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=dt6zCJ2VHok>, and Attenborough/BBC: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lAI6W2TOkh4>.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22206555>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239835>
It's pretty clear that the people who engage in toxic behaviours online are no different than they were prior to the emergence of those environments. It's the environment itself which triggers that behaviour.
That's baked into HN's philosophy:
"As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>
One of dang's fairly frequent observations is that HN tends to operate at the edge of chaos:
- "if moderation doesn't evolve as a community grows, one ends up with the default dynamic of internet forums: decay followed by heat death." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435202> (2019)
- "it's almost impossible to keep this place from collapsing" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164049> (2023)
- "Trying to keep the bottom from falling out on a public forum is harder than it perhaps sounds." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9712216> (2015)
- "[T]he internet doesn't do such fine distinctions. Please just keep away from that rail." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605136> (2017)
- "If 500-point stories on hot topics were dispositive, HN would be a 500-point-stories-on-hot-topics site. It isn't that kind of site, and intervention is required to keep it from going that way." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14306144> (2017)
- "Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34025076> (2019)
- "It's hard enough to keep these threads from incinerating themselves" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436973> (2022)
- "The important thing is to keep the site from burning in the first place." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445> (2021)
could be. I think it's mainly the phone number requirement within the past few years. The bad accounts have washed out. It's also likely why Google will soon delete old inactive accounts, created before this policy.
I've had an awful lot of engagement that's produced little value. (As I get older, I try to avoid that, increasingly. Not always successfully.)
I've had tremendous value from some very brief engagements, often one-liners or casual remarks, though also when someone shares a deep knowledge of a subject or a truly insightful personal experience.
Those are all exceptionally valuable, but in terms of "engagement metrics" such as replies, time-on-site, etc., they're often negatives. To turn a phrase: feed a person endless questions and challenges, and you'll keep them on site for a day. Provide them the answer or tools they need, and they disappear forever.
(Dating / matchmaking sites face a related version of this problem.)
With time, people who do value useful information come to realise the timesuck nature of high-engagement, low-value sites (o hai redditz) and avoid them like the plague.
Side observation: I'm playing with FastGPT (largely because it doesn't require registration to use, so I can't compare it to ChatGPT or other registration-required generative AIs), and one of the things that's useful about it is that it gives specific answers to specific questions, rather than sending me off on an endless quest through low-grade online sources.
Or even relatively high-grade ones such as Wikipedia, which might answer the immediate question but tend to prompt more. Curiosity ain't necessarily bad, except for cats....
What generative AI does that General Web Search does not is actually quench the thirst. Which is useful from a personal value perspective, though possibly a shock to the system for both online search and content providers.
But I disagree with your premise. I know several YouTubers with reasonably large communities that have incredibly fun and wholesome interactions in the comments, mainly made possible by this sentiment analysis. Negativity and positivity both have feedback loops. If you display negativity, people will be more negative; if you display positivity, people will be more positive.
They could remove the comment section entirely. They've had some version of a comment section for almost two decades now and at no point during that time have they succeeded at cultivating a platform wide culture for interesting comments.
Flame wars were obviously bad and negative. Generic positive comments are slightly better but they still do not say anything interesting related to the content of the video.
At this point, comments could just as well exist out-of-band on other platforms that have figured out how to foster discussions better (hint: extensive manual moderation is required, which Google will never provide).
I'd propose there is no need for a public comments section. I honestly don't understand this feature creep.
Some channels use the comment section extensively. PBS Space Time for example does a Q&A almost every episode where they answer questions posted as comments from previous videos.