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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

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achow

The video where he is showcasing it..

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDHTkowSkUM/

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reading the comments gave me a headache...

It's instagram.

Slight tangent: the YouTube comments used to be famous for being a vile cesspit. Then Google changed something, and now they are full of positivity. Often too full.

And for songs, often (fake?) testimonies to people's emotional attachments to the song.

It's not just me / the music videos I look up then, is it? I can't help but wonder if it's some kind of YT hive mind, bots, or Google's own algorithms pushing those comments to the top.

Seems like they just put the comments with the most likes at the top... stands to reason that more likes = nicer comment.

I'm not sure. I would have assumed that this naive algorithm is what they had at first, and what gave us the cesspool?

I'm not convinced that the current trend of positivity is not caused by bots, but I wouldn't be surprised if the old system was just based on engagement. Meaning that upvotes and downvotes would both push the comment up. This is not intuitive, but would fit with what we've been seeing for the last decade or so.

Oh, some of the positivity is surely caused by bots.

And lots of the cesspool was not caused by bots.

First part of your comment is right, but your reasoning is wrong. A couple years ago, YouTube changed the visibility of negative comments, such that positive comments are prioritized (can’t like a comment if you don’t even see it).

This was also around the time they removed the thumbs up/down count.

This was to prevent creator burnout; imagine if every video you put out had some snarky diss against you in the comments.

My favorite ones are the comment threads for sentimental songs from the 80’s—you just get a flood of heartbreaking stories from older folks talking about their first loves, now passed on.

moji moji moji who still bangin this in 2022? moji moji

The explanation I've heard for these is it's a low-effort bot comment that builds activity on the commenting account.

Whether that actually increases the value of an account or not, I'm not sure. But it's enough that spammers seem to think that having comments & replies on an account.

It may also be purchased comments to improve "engagement" metrics on videos for the creator.

Idk YouTube comments are still a cesspit, but now there are lobotomized bots saying nice things.

>Often too full.

Eh. Yeah. I posted a comment on a urban design video questioning the cost they gave for car ownership and the fact that they did not value the extra time it takes to use transit. Bam. Comment removed. Apparently the channel is able to moderate comments that don't fit their mentality

It may have been the channel owner, or more likely it may have been YouTube itself.

There have been a few discussions over at level1techs where people thought they thought the channel was moderating them for some strange reason, only to turn out it’s YouTube: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/l1t-youtube-shadowban-shadow...

More than once I’ve made a comment, went to edit a spelling mistake, and got an error on save because my completely unobjectionable comment was removed 10 seconds after posting.

YouTube has a horrible comment automation wordfilter/AI that will silently steamroll comments in a way that makes Reddit and 4chan mods seem rational. The channel owners don’t even see the comments (and last I checked, they don’t show up in your comment history either)

YouTube comments are vapid, in part because anything high effort/quality is likely to get deleted.

Yes, you can confirm if this is the case by going to "Your data in Youtube" and seeing if your comment still shows up there. If you click the direct link there it'll even take you to the video and highlight your comment. But if you reload the video without the querystring part that identifies your comment, you won't see it. It's happened to a bunch of mine too on and off over the years, and it's not because of negativity or anything.

You can even see it happening to other people - if you see a comment tree that says it has N replies, but then you expand it and it shows less than N replies, the same thing happened to the people who posted those missing replies too.

The same thing happens with my Google Maps reviews too. Google is too lazy and high on their farts about letting automation do their moderation to care.

I prefer it so much more. If you told me I would be a proponent of censorship in my 20s I would have laughed at you.

Because they're doing what people do here so often - responding to the headline, not the 'article.' The headline and first sentence are outright lies. "...known for printing his own unique currency—$2 bills that he personally designs." Uh ... no? He doesn't print it, he didn't design it.

"He doesn’t actually print official U.S. currency, which would be illegal. Instead, [he] purchases uncut sheets of $2 bills from the U.S. Treasury..."

Well, yeah - that's why it makes sense. But you have to read past the outright fabrications to get to the truth of the matter.

You don't have to. You could be a sane, intelligent person and not look at Instagram at all.

I didn't say it had to be done on instagram.

"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak prints his own money" -- closed the window. Dunno what I expected, clicking an Instagram link. Turns out there's no way to report content for misinformation, as I've just discovered, so that's cool. Definitely reaffirms my aversion to the platform.

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