Not only that, but people have discovered that comments shown to you on YouTube videos are also subject to "algorithmic scoring", based on your preferences, just like video recommendations.

About a year ago a video went viral where someone in a romantic relationship demonstrated that the opinions expressed in comments on videos shown to her differ radically from the opinions expressed in comments on the exact same video when viewed by her significant other using his account.

My wife and I then immediately verified that this was true for us as well.

The current trend is, relevant-looking top-upvoted comment followed by a thread where an innocent-looking account will ask an innocent question/request for recommendations, and get a helpful reply from multiple concerned kind "people" recommending the same resource... All AI bots from top to bottom

Yeah, but who gives a shit about YouTube comments? They've always been useless at best.

Even worse, YouTube is presently being over taken with AI slop content.