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Comment by animex | Hacker News Reader

This whole X debacle has fragmented the microblogging universe which is actually a good thing. TruthSocial and X have become right-wing staples. Threads seems to be full of positivity right now. Mastodon for the techies and niche communities. I've actually started exploring other sane places of community gathering like Reddit and oddly enough YouTube comments. As Karpathy recently commented, the YouTube comments section somehow became non-toxic overnight.

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I think most people commenting on YT have realized that only positivity gets visibility. Pick any video that has decent view count and you will see the first few comments saying "I just want to say, this video is so amazing" or "Wow you have put in so much work in making this video". Then the creator would like those comments and they stay at the top.

A lot of the time those look like bot comments that don't really say anything and could work for any video. Still much better than the bots that just copy a comment from someone else.

The YouTube comment section is non-toxic because only the “wow, this is amazing” comments are shown. Anything critical gets buried.

> I've actually started exploring other sane places of community gathering like Reddit

What sane subreddits have you found?

Not OP but I mostly use Reddit for media discussion: /r/movies , /r/books, /r/suggestmeabook, /r/horror, /r/printsf , etc. and they are pretty decent.

I've stayed clear from CS/IT subreddits for a long while now though.

My local city's subreddit is just full of people sharing interesting things. It's the first thing I actually look forward to reading. I'm in a number of tech subreddits and personal hobby ones that are all just full of signal vs. noise/toxicity

I have really come to understand that some Twitter users see Twitter as their own private garden somehow and do not realize that anyone can see your posts... So somehow it becomes uncomfortable when they are reminded of this fact.

You seem like one of these people.

You ONYL used twitter? You didnt use Reddit or Youtube? I am baffled but this makes the upset people make a bit more sense. Twitter was "theirs" so nobody else dare come in. They are the ones complaining about gatekeeping etc but treat Twitter like a chatroom and become offended when someone calls them out.

For the record, I do not have a Twitter account/phone banned. I am not in the USA. If I could vote in your elections I would vote Kamala. Just to be clear and to calm your blood pressue.

>Threads seems to be full of positivity right now.

Toxic positivity sure. ♥‿♥ YOU GO QUEEN!! SLAY!!! ♥‿♥

Last time I remember, YouTube comments were full of spam bots talking about vile things to get attention

And would you care to document for posterity when was that last time? I think the change in YouTube comments happened some 7-8 years ago, so 2017 or so.

Ironically the current spam trend is for bots to post very vague and effusive positive comments "Wow, you're such an inspiration" to try to get clicks on their profiles. I think the only real hateful bot trend was lengthy religious screeds maybe 2-3 years ago. Nowadays the religious spam is either more positive or apocalyptic I would say. There's plenty of people who post lots of hateful material, but since it's generally at least germane I assume it's at most trivially automated?

For me, the last time I saw it was last week. Prior to that, probably the week before. It's definitely gotten better over the last 2-3 years, but it's certainly not perfect.

I see "this video is awful, check out my channel" or "I did X awful thing, check my channel!" style spam comments on YouTube daily.

YouTube is clearly boosting "positive" comments. I am not sure it's a good solution if you care about other people's opinions.

"Somehow overnight" was when the videomaker become responsible for anything that was written under his rubric.

> TruthSocial and X have become right-wing staples.

I may be completely off, of course, but whenever I look at Twitter (without owing an account, so can't do it properly), I see people engaged in heated cross-wing arguments. If Twitter were so right-wing, wouldn't you expect far less arguments as there wouldn't be so many people voicing the opposite viewpoint? For comparison, how many users argue left-wing opinions on TruthSocial?

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