[HN Gopher] YouTube ranks "wholesome and funny" comments higher?
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YouTube ranks "wholesome and funny" comments higher?
Author : ipsum2
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-01-31 17:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| osrec wrote:
| That explains why every Indian or Pakistani music video has this
| sort of comment at the top with a few thousand likes:
|
| "I'm Indian/Pakistani, but hats off to Pakistan/India for
| creating this masterpiece. Music unites us all. Love to my
| brothers in Pakistan/India".
|
| I mean, I appreciate the sentiment, but it feels odd that it's
| expressed in the comments section of a random YouTube video!
|
| Another weird sort of comment is:
|
| "May your loved one be blessed and live a hundred years. One like
| = one blessing."
|
| Again, an embarrassingly high number of likes. Do people actually
| think a YouTube "like" is going to generate a blessing for them?!
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| > Again, an embarrassingly high number of likes. Do people
| actually think a YouTube "like" is going to generate a blessing
| for them?!
|
| You never know! Like this comment to get like blessing
| insurance. Like some of my other posts to get higher coverage.
| We protect you from bad luck from not liking posts.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I upvoted this comment just in case
| elcapitan wrote:
| While I think this may be helpful for the larger part of Youtube
| that is just entertainment, I find that in many parts where I'm
| looking for concrete information (like introductory talks on a
| topic, lectures etc), the "community" part is often not very
| helpful - if I can't see critical comments early or see the
| "thumbs up to down" ratio (which has been changed recently
| apparently to just show "up"), it's harder for me to judge
| whether I really want to invest 20-60 minutes into watching the
| video. So I end up just skipping through the video trying to get
| a first impression of what the quality is.
| simonsarris wrote:
| Especially things like wood-working and chain-sawing videos.
| Downvotes and critical comments are key if you want to keep
| your fingers and your head.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Especially things like wood-working and chain-sawing
| videos. Downvotes and critical comments are key if you want
| to keep your fingers and your head.
|
| Yeah. In an ideal world "howto videos for dangerous
| activities" or even just "howto videos in general" would have
| very special policies applied to them. There's a lot of
| people who have no idea what they're talking about who like
| to make howto videos, and it's super important to surface
| critical information about those.
|
| Which is a good demonstration of one of the fundamental
| problems of trying to make a general content-agnostic
| distribution platform. A general platform run according to
| contemporary business practices will tend towards one-size-
| fits-all policies, but that works about as well as one-size-
| fits-all pants.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >So I end up just skipping through the video trying to get a
| first impression of what the quality is.
|
| while this might seem annoying when one is used to the up/down
| vote mechanism I honestly think incentivizing people to check
| content for themselves is a significant improvement.
|
| I think a lot of websites should remove signals and tone down
| recommender systems in favor of making people just watch or
| read. It's one of the things I still like about HN. The greyed
| out downvoted comments and order aside there's no real visual
| cues or gamified mechanisms here.
| skilled wrote:
| I've always disliked YT comments. It's either one liners or
| verified people pretending like they like the video.
| tomcam wrote:
| How do you know they're pretending?
| Leary wrote:
| Maybe they overweighs downvotes, thus pushing only
| uncontroversial comments up.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Occam's razor says it's probably something very simple like
| that
| RankingMember wrote:
| I'd be interested to know if that's the case, as it'd present a
| shift from their long-held strategy of having the comment
| downvote button do absolutely nothing.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > it'd present a shift from their long-held strategy of
| having the comment downvote button do absolutely nothing.
|
| This seems to be a common refrain, despite little evidence to
| back it up. Just because the dislike button doesn't render a
| count doesn't mean that it isn't being counted and used to
| weight comments.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Fair point. It'd be helpful if there was some transparency
| from Youtube.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I think dumb people are just nicer than smart people.
| stnikolauswagne wrote:
| Idk, being incredibly toxic and/or racist online doesn't seem
| particularly smart to me, in the case of getting doxed or
| caught on social media at work I would rather defend my
| questionable taste in music and hobbies to my boss rather than
| actual vile or racist comments.
| etchalon wrote:
| There are fewer people meaner than a dumb person who thinks
| they're smart.
| zionic wrote:
| Might that be evolutionary?
|
| If you're stupid and can't provide for yourself pissing others
| off is a quick way to starve.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Maybe. Mostly I think smart people spend a lot of time trying
| to be dicks in the most clever way possible, especially on
| social media.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Counterpoint: Fascists are extremely dumb and not nice.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Fascists are wrong, but I don't think they are particularly
| dumb on average when compared to other fringe ideologies.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Compared to average is what matters, not compared to other
| "fringe" ideologies. I think to equate "fringe" with dumb
| in general is foolish.
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| There seems to be some perverted notion that "wholesome and
| funny" is somehow better. Its not. Its manipulative and a case of
| "I know whats good for you" that can only result when someone
| thinks they are actually better than you.
|
| These aren't people making the things "wholesome and funny". They
| are criminals in teddy bear outfits controlling what people hear.
| Modern day clowns.
| Arainach wrote:
| Have you seen YouTube comments circa 2006-2019 (no idea when
| this change was implemented, I gave up on reading the comments
| long ago)? Some of the worst toxicity of the entire Internet.
| 4chan at least had some funny parts, YT comments were just
| awful. This isn't censorship, it's trying to build an
| experience that doesn't actively turn people away from your
| platform.
| serf wrote:
| >This isn't censorship, it's trying to build an experience
| that doesn't actively turn people away from your platform.
|
| i'm here to tell you that the cutesy shit drives certain
| people away.
|
| 'Funny' isn't some objective quality that things can be
| neatly sorted into with any level of accuracy, except in
| cases of the worst most generic/juvenile types of humor that
| are guaranteed to get a chuckle from 'some idiot' out there.
|
| The parody show 'Ow! My Balls!' in the movie 'Idiocracy'
| comes to mind.
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| > 2006-2019
|
| I believe this was when youtube was growing.
|
| > it's trying to build an experience that doesn't actively
| turn people away
|
| I believe youtube was growing at this time.
|
| I personally don't remember it being that toxic. But even if
| it were whose responsibility should it be to deal with the
| toxicity? The platform's or the content creator's?
|
| There's a saying that's oft repeated "dont read the comments
| section". That's a strategy in line with the approach I'd
| endorse. We shouldn't be censoring information just because
| its "toxic", people need to find ways to withstand or ignore
| or deal with the criticism that exists in the world.
|
| People develop weak immune systems if they are protected from
| everything, it's not just a biological thing. The American
| mind is as coddled as their biological immune system. We
| should be teaching people how to deal and withstand criticism
| whether valid or caustic. Otherwise we get this mad world
| where no one can offend anyone and you can't even tell
| clinically obese people their body is not healthy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > I personally don't remember it being that toxic. But even
| if it were whose responsibility should it be to deal with
| the toxicity?
|
| Wrong way to frame the incentives. "Who benefits if the
| toxicity is dealt with?" is the relvant question.
|
| (... and the answer is "the platform owner, assuming they
| attract more viewers with honey than acid." So, a
| predictable outcome if the premise holds).
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| This, I can't disagree with.
|
| But moralistically I'm still at odds with the coddling.
| dpark wrote:
| Does this mean you think there's some moral obligation to
| allow toxic people to diminish a platform at everyone
| else's expense?
|
| Toxic racists in YouTube comments did not provide any
| value to anyone, but they did create an environment that
| encouraged others to behave in toxic ways and they
| diminished the enjoyment many others derived from the
| platform.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Disney makes an insane amount of money off of its
| multiple theme parks.
|
| There's a lot of people willing to trade their hard-
| earned valuables (coin, time, what have you) for a little
| gentleness and softness. I don't see that as a moral ill.
|
| The world is sharp, cold, apathetic, and dangerous.
| People know. That doesn't imply people need to live in
| that part all the time if circumstances do not force them
| to.
|
| In fact, one could argue most of the last ten-odd-
| thousand years of building societies has been a slow
| crawl towards figuring out how to _make_ something less
| sharp, cold, apathetic, and dangerous for people to spend
| their days in.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The answer is: everyone who's not toxic.
| oblio wrote:
| > I personally don't remember it being that toxic.
|
| Then you're probably not remembering it right. Its toxicity
| levels were off the charts. I'd go out of my way to block
| the comments just so I couldn't see them when a video would
| be loading and have them ruin my day.
|
| > But even if it were whose responsibility should it be to
| deal with the toxicity? The platform's or the content
| creator's?
|
| Well, as they say, "my house, my rules". It's their house
| :-)
|
| > People develop weak immune systems if they are protected
| from everything, it's not just a biological thing.
|
| > We should be teaching people how to deal and withstand
| criticism whether valid or caustic.
|
| Nobody can withstand internet criticism. We weren't built
| for this. We were built for a tribe of apes around us, most
| of which would leave us alone to not disturb the social
| hierarchy. There's no psyche on this planet that can
| withstand a torrent of crap thrown onto it from all over
| the world. See articles about Facebook moderators for more
| details (those poor souls!).
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| Yes, and no one can withstand the barrage of internet
| dopamine bullets. I agree, we weren't designed for it.
| But I disagree that no one can withstand the barrage.
| People can teach themselves to fend these things off, in
| fact I think its the only thing that works.
| oblio wrote:
| We can't really teach that at scale. And even if we
| could, sometimes you just can't avoid some situations,
| they just happen.
|
| Most jurisdictions around the world have laws against
| verbal assault (threatening others with actual harm) or
| verbal harassment, for this very reason. Verbal
| interactions can lead to very real effects (people have
| been driven to suicide, for example).
|
| Some people we interact with are just cuckoo and if we
| can't get out of there quickly there needs to be a way to
| keep the situation under control.
| drusepth wrote:
| Curious: what makes you think people can teach themselves
| to manage endless deluges of toxicity, but not teach
| themselves to manage internet dopamine bullets?
| emn13 wrote:
| That optimism, particularly in this crowd that likely
| skews towards techies, may be a significant cause of a
| solid slice of the world's problems today.
|
| We sometimes like to see ourselves as little Sherlock
| Holmes' - humans on a trajectory of ever more self-
| improvement and breathtaking intellect. All data is good
| data, all speech is good speech, because it feeds the
| ever improving intellect. Misinformation is at worst a
| temporary blip that more communication will correct.
| We're little Googles that slurp up data and spit out ever
| improving judgements.
|
| But we're _not_ that rational, and _not_ that great at
| filtering information. We have biases that are trivially
| exploitable at scale, and we 're rather good at building
| machines or even merely memes to exploit those.
|
| We need to start accepting human cognitive weaknesses,
| and that includes doing a bit of informational gardening
| - pruning out the weeds before they choke everything we
| value. You don't feed ML algorithms maliciously distorted
| training data and hope for them to nevertheless magically
| converge to something useful, do you? (And no, GAN ML
| doesn't do that either yet - but please correct me if I'm
| behind the times - because the detectors aren't really
| adversarial but rather specific training targets and thus
| a detector from one GAN can't detect another's fakes -
| and in any case, it's all still based on trusted training
| data - which is exactly what humans don't have).
|
| I don't believe this problem is fixable until we
| recognize that freedom of speech in an era of mass
| manipulation via social media is intrinsically dangerous.
| We all understand the upsides and have been well
| indoctrinated against risks of government ministries for
| truth, but the reality is that we're all agents in an
| immensely complex system where we want certain
| convergence properties, yet are kind of assuming that
| specific hyper simplistic policies will achieve those
| goals - and assuming that almost as gospel. I don't buy
| that that's going work. I don't think it actually _ever_
| worked, which is why we have stuff like fraud statutes,
| and _do_ penalize lying in all kinds of other scenarios.
| Even more critically, social _norms_ imposed heavy extra-
| legal punishment on frauds and other informational
| polluters. We just turned extreme freedom of expression
| into an article of patriotism to show we were team
| america; and to distinguish ourselves from team soviet or
| team monarchy - but that was (fortunately!) merely skin
| deep because various legal restrictions actually remained
| and in any case social punishments matter more than legal
| ones - and being seen as a fraud or liar _used_ to be a
| quick way to becoming a pariah.
|
| But without speech-restricting social norms against
| deception, and with a public attitude that sometimes even
| _embraces_ falsehood as a symbol of pride for ones rights
| - well, then truth is optional; and quixotically the
| _whole point_ of freedom of expression disappears, being
| that it's a tool to discover and disseminate new insights
| and burn away corruption via transparency. Speech is
| irrelevant when the only people listening are those that
| share your opinion anyhow. And where social norms remain,
| we've pulled their teeth by accepting that employees have
| no responsibility for a corporation's actions unless
| they're very directly linked (e.g. I wouldn't blame a
| facebook employee personally for facebook-spread
| misinformation, yet I would if they spread it
| themselves), yet corporations are increasingly
| everpresent as tools to mediate daily interactions.
|
| Until we face up to the reality that core founding
| principles we hang some of our identities on are
| _actively harmful_ in some scenarios, we're not going to
| be able to consider how to improve ourselves. Instead,
| we'll tell ourselves comforting bedtime tales of how
| people can teach themselves to fend these things off, and
| how team free speech always wins in the end. Until, one
| day, it doesn't.
| Jeema101 wrote:
| It's fine if you think that attempting to remove toxic content
| amounts to censorship - you have a right to that opinion - but
| it doesn't change the fact that the toxicity itself still
| exists. But are you also angry at the people in society who
| create that toxicity or just the people trying to control it?
| kupopuffs wrote:
| I remember Old Youtube. It was disgusting and vile and I've
| never heard of more human hatred over the smallest things TBH
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I remember when G+ tried to consume YouTube comments.
|
| My immediate reaction was "You could... But why do you want
| to? In what scenario is it going to benefit your fledgling
| social network to chug toxic waste?"
|
| ... apparently, it didn't.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Are you serious? Old Youtube comments were the dumbest, vilest
| shit. This was commonly understood and accepted across the
| internet. Almost anything would be an improvement from that.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| For a document from this time pointing this out, see
| https://xkcd.com/202/ (from 2006) and https://xkcd.com/481/
| (from 2008)
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| You say this as if the comment section used to be some oasis of
| invigorating debate among reasonable people.
|
| I find the wholesome and funny comments to be relatively
| uninteresting and dull 90% of the time, but it's leaps and
| bounds better than the unmitigated angry mud slinging that used
| to be there.
| Spivak wrote:
| You have it framed backwards It's that "angry, mean, and toxic"
| are bad and the reason YT comments are a meme for their low
| quality. And then combine with the fact that "neutral" comments
| are boring you get "positive, funny, wholesome" as natural
| candidates for what should rise to the top.
|
| It's a no-win if you demand that comments go largely
| unmoderated. Because we had that and it made them genuinely
| useless to the point where creators turned them off and people
| installed add-ons to remove them.
| not2b wrote:
| I like what they've been doing; a couple of years ago the YouTube
| comment section was toxic, now it's actually pleasant to read.
| Does this mean that some relevant criticism might get downvoted?
| Perhaps, but probably not if it is well written and worded
| politely.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| URL should point to
| https://twitter.com/nikhilbd/status/1488027319935537153, not the
| archived version.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Why? The archive version is much easier to access without an
| account.
| pvg wrote:
| It's in the guidelines - use the original source, workarounds
| to soft restrictions are typically posted in thread.
| gillytech wrote:
| Tweets can be and are deleted. Archives make sense in this
| case.
| dang wrote:
| In deleted cases, yes, but not in advance. We love archives
| (and archive.org most of all), but they shouldn't be used as
| submission URLs when an original is available. For one thing,
| it's important for the original domain to be displayed.
|
| Of course it's always fine to link to an archived copy from
| the comments, and we intend eventually to build software
| support for this.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| To add to this, since it linked to the archived version I
| thought it was taken down for some reason. Giving the
| original source makes it clear it's still up.
| dang wrote:
| We changed to the original tweet in the thread. Submitted URL
| was https://web.archive.org/web/20220131130754/https://twitter.
| c.... Thanks!
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Whatever these folks at YouTube are doing with the comments
| section, they're doing a great job. I really enjoy YouTube
| comments - I check them for every video I watch, and I often get
| more laughs from the comments than I do from the actual video!
| Would love to know more details about how this is implemented. I
| assume it's some sort of massively scalable NLP & ML system?
| RankingMember wrote:
| Wow, I want whatever YouTube's giving you. The comments I see
| are the same joke over and over again and/or those horrible
| people that drag politics into every conversation.
| tragictrash wrote:
| Yeah this is my experience. Totally the opposite. Just people
| disrespecting and arguing in the comments section about
| nothing.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| uejfiweun wrote:
| I suppose an important variable is what kind of content the
| algorithm recommends to you. In my recommendeds I mostly get
| clips from my favorite shows, funny prank videos, some cool
| informative stuff like Kurzgesagt, food content, and video
| game content. I'd guess that if you venture into the news /
| politics realm, the comments degrade accordingly, but I
| purposely try not to watch that stuff so I'm not sure.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| My usual experience is that the top rated post is either
| insightful or a chuckle, but if you delve into the child
| comments from that particular post, or any more than a couple
| down, and it is an outright flame war over something trivial.
| jandrese wrote:
| Grandparent post is nuts. Youtube comments are mostly full of
| repetitive jokes in the current meme formats. Sometimes there
| is a quality contribution, but it probably won't be near the
| top.
|
| This does vary by channel of course, but if you're talking
| about a popular channel that shows up for non-logged in users
| like LockPicking Lawyer then the comments will consist of the
| same tired and lame but highly upvoted jokes in every thread.
| Maybe if you scroll down far enough you'll get an anecdote
| about the company that manufactured the lock or something,
| but never above the "lol, it just falls apart when LPL looks
| in its direction!" comments.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I think it depends on what you're watching. People can have
| very different experiences on the same site, because they
| choose which content to consume.
|
| Personally, I tend to have a good experience with YouTube
| comments, but I'm definitely familiar with the memes you're
| talking about on certain videos.
| brimble wrote:
| > Grandparent post is nuts. Youtube comments are mostly
| full of repetitive jokes in the current meme formats.
| Sometimes there is a quality contribution, but it probably
| won't be near the top.
|
| I _have_ noticed that they 've improved from "zero-value
| abuse" to just "zero-value". I assume because they've
| gotten better at burying the abuse. Which is... something.
| saulrh wrote:
| YouTube comments, like every other comments section on the
| internet, vary hugely depending on the population that's
| writing comments. Understanding why you have different
| populations on different YT videos is harder than
| understanding why you have different populations on, say,
| different discussion boards (e.g. HN vs 4chan), but it is
| absolutely the case. The kind of person that upvotes a
| comment underneath a talk show from a major right-wing
| media empire is very, _very_ different from the kind of
| person that upvotes a comment underneath a video from an
| amateur watchmaker who puts up hour-long videos of him
| repairing hundred-year-old wristwatches and pocketwatches.
| Especially if you 're watching channels that are small
| enough or straightforward enough that there just aren't any
| memes to be memed, like the aforementioned watchmaker.
| oblio wrote:
| Heh.
|
| Also those "Who's listening to <random song> in 2028?" or
| "Timeless classic" on every old song (even kind of garbage
| ones, after all, emotional attachment doesn't really
| discriminate much).
| dpark wrote:
| Comments on music videos are the absolute worst. It's 99%
| the same garbage comments on every video. On the off
| chance that an original comment is made, karma whores
| will literally repost it word for word looking for
| upvotes. (And they'll get them because the new comments
| will for some reason often bubble up above the original.)
|
| This inane garbage is way better than the racist garbage
| that preceded it, though.
| lamontcg wrote:
| This is the same thing with reddit. Always some dumb pun
| thread. The same people trying to be funny with stuff like
| "<record scratch>" jokes or "narrator:" jokes. There's this
| expositional style that I hate as well where someone will
| ELI5 something serious and completely mangle it but just
| make it sound good and it gets wildly upvoted.
|
| I'm starting to believe that whole NPC bots meme now (which
| is also pretty annoying, sorry).
|
| And "wholesome" itself is a meme that is pretty annoying.
| It tends to drag "inane and superficial" along with it.
| Feels like we get so tired of walking past human tragedies
| camped on the sidewalk all day long that when we get home
| we sit there like coke-addicted mice slapping the
| "wholesome" button to get our Soma so that we forget what
| we just saw.
| mdoms wrote:
| Agree completely. If it's not the same stupid inside joke
| over and over again it's wholesome but contentless "Great
| video thanks for posting" stuff.
| Fricken wrote:
| The last time I made a deliberate effort to read a YouTube
| comment was, I think, sometime around 2007.
| oblio wrote:
| Well, I remember going through Youtube comments across the
| years. Now they're slightly bad but at the start they had no
| moderation.
|
| I've been on various internet forums across the years and
| also on IRC.
|
| I've haven't been on 4chan or whatever that thing is called,
| I think it's meant to be a completely unmoderated forum?
|
| In any case, forums ranged from horrible to amazing. IRC,
| same.
|
| The original, totally unmoderated version of Youtube comments
| was the worst dumpster fire I've ever seen. Stupidity, hate,
| racism, you name it, it was there. It probably had one of the
| worst communities in the history of communities.
|
| Then about 5 (10?) years ago they added some kind of ranking
| system that improved things. It went from being maybe the
| worst mainstream community on the planet to somewhere in the
| bottom 100, I'd say. Quite an improvement :-))
|
| So if they improved it again, maybe they'll reach Reddit main
| subreddits levels soon :-p
| hyperhopper wrote:
| It really depends massively on the videos, for some
| engineering videos I see comments that are insightful or make
| me die laughing. Though for other things that I would guess
| are for a similar demographic, like lock picking lawyer,
| every comment there could be the same for every other LPL
| video "click on 3, 2 is binding" jokes, comments on how it's
| never a fluke, comments on how fast he opens it or how bad
| the lock is, etc
| thisisnico wrote:
| [deleted]
| 3np wrote:
| I recently, for no particular reason, have been watching some
| of the top videos on YT over a couple of months.
|
| I noticed many (most?) of the top comments are made by accounts
| that on a closer look are promoting or even selling what must
| be some kind of scam or MLM. Would be fair to call them
| submarine comments.
|
| Several of them were even verbatim duplicates of other comments
| on the same video. I got the feeling that a lot of this is
| automated, and not by the people supposed to be running the
| platform.
|
| Just open up the YT front page in a clean unpersonalized
| session and go into those Minecraft/Fortnite/whatever that tend
| to end up high in the rankings and you'll probably see what I
| mean.
| dpark wrote:
| > _Several of them were even verbatim duplicates of other
| comments on the same video._
|
| I don't know how many of these are robots vs knowing karma
| whores, but it's definitely a pervasive problem.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I've seen it too. Youtube comments for popular videos,
| alongside Twitter replies, is one of those places where the
| comments rarely seem made by an actual human
| drusepth wrote:
| I have the same experience. Most of the stuff I watch [1] is a
| lot less "meme-y" than I imagine the typical YouTube video, but
| I almost always check the comments and find either useful
| and/or funny comments.
|
| It's a loooong way away from the comment section of just a few
| years ago, which was almost always full of rage, poorly-written
| comments, politics, and inside jokes.
|
| [1] Sample of my homepage: https://i.imgur.com/IrmWii4.png
| steelstraw wrote:
| I agree, they're often surprisingly funny and witty. To take a
| random example, I just looked at the comments of Lex's recent
| interview with Elon
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxREm3s1scA) and saw:
|
| "This is the best conversation between two robots that I've
| ever witnessed."
|
| The other top comments are just friendly and positive.
| Karsteski wrote:
| I admire the sarcasm
| [deleted]
| oblib wrote:
| I think it depends on what you're watching. Political stuff can
| tend to have comments that get pretty snarky whereas lighter
| entertainment oriented content would obviously tend to get more
| "thumbs up" and humorous comments.
|
| From there it's probably fair to say that way more younger people
| watch lighter stuff than oldsters there, and there are probably a
| lot more younger folks using YouTube than oldsters.
| edpichler wrote:
| Once we learn how the algorithm rules works, the game changes.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I'd really like to know more about this -- the replies to the
| original question were divided between people commenting about
| how much better the comments were, and people talking about
| better tooling and empowerment being granted to large YT
| creators.
|
| My instinct is that the progress has been primarily because of
| the better tooling and moderation capabilities, just because the
| larger companies always promise that ML will take care of their
| large-scale moderation processes without much concrete evidence.
| But I also suspect that the answer is somewhere between the two
| approaches, and it would be great if YT were able to improve the
| wider ecosystem by sharing some of their strategies.
| gpt5 wrote:
| I'd argue that YouTube simply implemented a Reddit like sorting
| mechanism.The top comments on a YouTube video are very similar
| to Reddit.
|
| When you optimize for engagement (e.g. Facebook's sorting), you
| get toxicity. When you optimize for approval, you get funny and
| wholesome stuff.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Reddit top comments are notorious for usually bashing the
| original post or pointing out how it's wrong. It's a very
| common trope for there being a super upvoted front page
| story, and for the first comment to be "actually this is
| false/incorrect/incomplete/somehow a lie". This basically
| never happens on Youtube comments.
| guerrilla wrote:
| So, basically the same as HN.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| HN is pretty much reddit as it was before subreddits were
| introduced
| throwaway946513 wrote:
| new idea: subHN, subreddits but fore HN
| gpt5 wrote:
| This is another good trait of the reddit sorting - much
| better to fight misinformation. With that said, jokes and
| wholesome comments do bubble up to the top quickly.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Am I the only one who misses ALL CAPS RAGE COMMENTS and horibly
| mispelled wrod sallad comments? Oh, and remember link comments?
| And what about those ascii art ones that you had to click on "see
| more" to get the full effect from? Oh or how about, substantive
| comments that disagreed with the the content of the video? Yeah,
| those were great, back before every video was watched mainly by
| subscribers who would become the echo chamber for content
| creators, even if they and YouTube mods (see the algorithm)
| didn't purge you first. Yeah, YouTube comments are great if you
| never want to be challenged by anything.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| I feel your rage, but wait until you read Reddit comments.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| You can still sort by chronological... it's not the same, but
| it helps remember what was lost.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Sorry, are we playing the same universe? Youtube comments used
| to famously be the "worst of the worst", and the example you'd
| give to people if you wanted them to lose their faith in the
| internet.
| robrenaud wrote:
| I am pretty sure OP was sarcastic and you missed it over
| text.
| causi wrote:
| Youtube started being a corporatized content farm the day they
| removed video replies.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I only remember video replies as a feature that allowed
| spammer camgirls to show their face on the related video feed
| SllX wrote:
| I remember them as something I ignored after about the
| first week, and the first week as basically the first
| inklings of political YouTube. "Neat" when it's sitting on
| a whiteboard, but not all that engaging nor interesting in
| reality.
| corobo wrote:
| video replies were a corporatized content farm themselves tbf
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl
| badRNG wrote:
| There were a number of years where I would have been happy if
| YouTube just removed the comment section. The "culture" of
| comments in the early '10s is reminiscent of what you find today
| on sites like 4chan. Scrolling down to the comments could
| truthfully be a deeply upsetting experience that can offset the
| value provided by whatever you were watching.
|
| "Don't read the YouTube comments" was a common phrase, and for
| good reason. Nowadays, I wouldn't say YouTube comments are
| especially funny or insightful, but they are certainly tolerable.
| I imagine having a list of epithets, slurs, and phrases (and
| accounts that use them) to de-rank would have gone far enough to
| help fix the nightmare that was the comment section.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I think a lot of the improvement is also old-guard media
| companies realizing they don't have to leave comments turned on
| for their livestreams and video uploads. Those comment sections
| were invariably absolute sewers of the worst of the worst
| commentary.
|
| The livestreams were particularly bad because there'd be a
| comment box live-updating at breakneck pace right next to the
| video. I recall a description of the livestream of that SpaceX
| launch of the Tesla Roadster into space that was particularly
| striking- Here's this placid video feed of Starman calmly
| floating through space after escaping planet Earth juxtaposed
| with the incoherent screeching of the millions of angry apes
| stuck on it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Maybe the problem isn't technological and there's something
| wrong with society and we should start focusing on that.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| No, the problem is absolutely technological. Easily getting
| huge visibility with anonymity and no one gatekeeping you was
| a much more limited thing prior to internet.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Facebook is not anonymous and has all the same crap. In any
| case, it's a thing now. And when you shut it down in one
| place shows up in another. I really do think it's a problem
| with humans that this stuff just brought to the surface. It
| was always there with bullying and passive aggressive
| viciousness and in private conversations everywhere, now
| it's just in the sunshine. All this stuff is in people's
| brains. Silencing it isn't going to fix that.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Also, it's kind of irrelevant to toxicity as Facebook
| proves since that's not anonymous at all yet you find the
| same thing.
|
| FB is still really bad, but in my experience it really
| depends on whether it's arguing with internet randos vs
| people you're actually friends -- or friends-of-friends
| -- with. The former is still horrible, but that's because
| you're nearly anonymous when it comes to someone across
| the country. I think it's not as bad as some internet
| comments though, people are more hesitant to say the
| really blatantly racist or murder-y stuff on something
| attached to their real name. It still happens, but not as
| often.
|
| When people are arguing with those they actually know on
| FB, I find they hold back a lot more. They can still be
| mean, but they don't go as extreme.
| guerrilla wrote:
| (Sorry rewrote my comment a bit on you but your reply
| still makes sense)
|
| > When people are arguing with those they actually know
| on FB, I find they hold back a lot more. They can still
| be mean, but they don't go as extreme.
|
| This is what I mean by it's a societal/human problem
| though, that there is something to hold back... I say
| that is the root of it.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Hmm I guess I agree in a sense. A couple things to keep
| in mind though:
|
| * Humans largely evolved in small tribes/bands. We just
| weren't built for communicating with and relating to
| potentially thousands or millions at a time. Not a
| surprise then if there are some 'bugs' lurking.
|
| * Even sans the internet, while you may not have had this
| particular problem, you definitely had some others. I'm
| reminded of a part of The World Until Yesterday where the
| author talks about little kids in a non-state tribe
| spontaneously celebrating around the corpse of an enemy
| tribe member that had been killed. By modern internet
| standards, all of those little kids are sociopaths, or
| maybe the adults that raised them are all sociopaths,
| because according to many people today, any sort of
| obvious 'darkness' in human personality, like a tendency
| for violence, makes you a sociopath. I think the reality
| is that yeah, parts of our peronalities are fucked up,
| but that's essentially normal. It may even be a feature,
| rather than a bug.
|
| Anyway yeah, you could view it as a part of human nature
| that's just revealed by new technology.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > Nowadays, I wouldn't say YouTube comments are especially
| funny or insightful
|
| I find that a lot of them are something like 'lol', or 'love
| the way X did Y' / an unfunny meme (with thousands of thumbs
| ups) / something else along those lines. I find myself
| scrolling quite a long way to find anything insightful about
| what I watched, and just for something I can take with me in
| general.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| That has to depend a lot on the content you watch. I did a
| mini test with three videos I found on my list to test this
| out:
|
| The only video I found that sorta matches this is Chanel 5's
| ComplexCon video: https://youtu.be/jy9x09iCATA which has
| mostly meme replies.
|
| Mentour Pilot made a video about a 747 crash
| https://youtu.be/Y50saxfTqQA and the top reply is from a
| pilot with a lot of the other replies being from pilots as
| well.
|
| And the last video I looked at was one titled "All 8 Species
| of Bear" https://youtu.be/7DERN0R3AbM which I thought would
| definitely have trash comments because it seemed to be from
| one of those "Top #" click bait channels. But the top replies
| are bear stories, species information, and some zoologists.
| No idea how accurate the info is, however.
| jlack wrote:
| I think it depends on the niche of the particular video. I've
| found channels like woodworking/machining have insightful
| comments from professionals in that field which may have
| alternate solutions or point out why something is done a
| certain way.
| showerst wrote:
| Seconding this -- the comments on machining and electronics
| videos tend to be great, comments on gaming videos are
| usually just jokes. This makes intuitive sense to me;
| different viewer bases who want to see different things.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| And what can be more wholesome than praising the Supreme Leader!
| (Or perhaps praising Supreme(tm)!)
|
| Sorry about the flippant tone, but I hope we've learned that any
| system like this operating behind closed doors can be and will be
| used for manipulation and (much more direct) profit-seeking.
|
| And even before that happens, the idea itself is full of cultural
| bias, and so brings in cultural discrimination and the imposition
| of one culture's idea of wholesome/funny on the whole world, by
| its very nature.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Okay, but the previous status quo was abominable. "Don't read
| the youtube comments" was a well understood internet meme for a
| reason.
|
| This is a massive improvement on what came before. Maybe it
| could be better yet, but I haven't seen anything better myself
| for websites in a similar situation.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Maybe Youtube just shouldn't have comments? Thinking about
| it, you're not really going to get discussions on a platform
| like that.
|
| Likes and similar, fine. Maybe evolve that. Maybe do the
| whole Dark Souls thing where you can only leave gestures and
| stock messages. Sure, you'll still get "try finger, but hole"
| and "amazing chest ahead", but that's still streets ahead of
| Youtube's communication.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I mean the current setup seems fine to me. Yeah it's
| probably kind of a hugbox-y, and prioritizes simplistic
| comments like funny one-liners over anything insightful or
| deep, but that's not the worst thing in the world. I'm not
| sure they're adding much, but they don't seem to be taking
| away either.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think more as an alternative to the type of algorithmic
| censorship that they're doing now. I don't think we want
| a future where we have to mind how an algorithm might
| interpret what we say lest our communication will
| silently vanish.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I think this is the kind of situation where HN commenters
| have decided that something has no value to them,
| therefore it must have no value generally and must be
| done away with.
|
| Obviously YouTube probably values having comments, but
| beyond them I'm betting creators do too. How do you
| respond to them wanting to keep comments?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Since it's impossible to actually discuss with anyone
| (replies randomly vanish), I would ask what value they
| bring to anyone.
|
| You can create vanishing messages even without youtube
| providing the service. Write a comment on a piece of
| toiletpaper and flush it down.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| tus666 wrote:
| Sounds like bread-and-butter kind of machine learning stuff to
| me.
| coolso wrote:
| Is that why all YouTube comments are exactly the same now? It's
| like the top of every major subreddit post's comment section.
| It's almost as if you're witnessing 14 year olds discover the
| internet and humor, but over and over again on a daily basis.
|
| The homogeneity of the internet is becoming so tiresome.
| GaylordTuring wrote:
| Nobody:
|
| Absolutely nobody:
|
| OP: I'm TiReD oF THe SamE joKEs!1!
|
| (On a serious note, I totally agree with you.)
| Spivak wrote:
| You could utter this exact statement every day since 1995.
|
| You're also trapped in your own eternal September, doomed to
| remember your own personal "early" internet as being so much
| better because it was all new to you despite the fact that it
| was someone else's "oh my god it's all the same now."
| coolso wrote:
| > You could utter this exact statement every day since 1995.
|
| No you couldn't. Because back then, even 10-15 years after
| 1995, not everyone went to the same 3 websites, and there
| were more than 3 companies on the web that owned everything.
| Furthermore, there was no concept of upvotes and downvotes to
| literally encourage crafting your comments to appeal to the
| widest audience / lowest common denominator. (This concept is
| no longer specific to Reddit by the way; nearly every comment
| section on every website utilizes the same type of deal.)
|
| Back then if you wanted to speak your mind or say something,
| you could just type it out and everyone would see it. Today,
| if you want to say something, you need to craft your comment
| in such a way to make it worth it: sure, you could say
| exactly what you want. But that might only get one upvote.
| Or, God forbid, it might get downvoted! Then nobody sees it;
| furthermore, the rating your receive could potentially work
| against you and make the hivemind turn further against your
| argument. Because lots of people downvoted it. Or not many
| people upvoted it. Which means it's bad / not good.
|
| It's a perverse incentive. The result is... usually,
| milquetoast homogeneous repetition.
| guerrilla wrote:
| This makes a mistake of forgetting the part where none of
| this was new to us yet this homogenization and sterilization
| hadn't happened yet.
| impalallama wrote:
| i hate to assume they don't weigh endless replies as much as
| other social media platforms out there, (100+ comment reply
| chains is a pretty big sign at something not being wholesome)
| dpark wrote:
| That's a good observation. long reply chains do tend to turn to
| garbage rapidly. Either it's an "in joke" meme chain (like used
| to consume nearly all Reddit threads) or it's an argument.
| Which kind of makes sense because YouTube comments are a poor
| venue for valuable back and forth discussions so it's just
| going to be garbage driving back and forth.
| paulpauper wrote:
| youtube comments are so heavily censored it's crazy. Tons of
| ghosting going on.
| thirteenfingers wrote:
| Indeed. Just last week there was a whole thread here on HN
| about the problems with toxicity detectors:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066720 I'm not sure if
| this is the system youtube is using, but it would certainly
| align with my experience where people have left innocuous
| comments on my videos that disappear a couple hours later -
| comments such as "this music is beautiful, damn" where the only
| thing I can think of, short of that user's entire account
| getting deactivated, is that the word "damn" tripped some sort
| of toxicity flag.
|
| I hate bullies as much as the next person on HN, but I'm deeply
| unsettled by youtube's recent efforts in the direction of
| manufacturing consent.
| bliteben wrote:
| I don't understand how they don't expect a first amendment case
| against them, they likely are discriminating against certain
| ethnicities, races, or localities in using algorithms to block
| / sort comments. It seems like at some point all automated
| moderation like this will have to be reviewable.
|
| On the other hand it is nice that their comment section isn't
| as toxic as it once was.
| fallingknife wrote:
| There is no first amendment right to have your comment
| visible on Youtube. In fact, Youtube has the first amendment
| right to show whatever comments they want. They could even
| have fake accounts that post positive comments and upvotes,
| and charge users money for artificial engagement. Google
| executives could decide that they wanted to support literal
| Nazis, and promote their videos, add fake likes and
| engagements, and do the opposite to any opposing political
| views. This would all be perfectly legal.
|
| We have restricted the constitutional rights of corporations
| in other cases e.g. utilities, though. And we can do it
| again.
| kube-system wrote:
| Because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are a
| governmental founding document and _only_ apply to the
| government. Alphabet is not part of the government, and
| therefore, it does not apply.
|
| Discrimination by companies toward the public is covered
| mainly by Civil Rights Act (or the Americans with
| Disabilities Act in the case of discrimination based on
| disability).
| bliteben wrote:
| yeah yeah separate but equal
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| A first amendment case based on what? They're not the
| government.
| bliteben wrote:
| Employers can't discriminate based on any of these things
| and there is no right to be employed. This will keep coming
| up as the percent of speech that happens on monopolized
| platforms continues to increase.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| What types of comments are being censored? A lot of people
| claim HN is heavily censored, but when you turn on "showdead"
| it reveals mostly truly vile and awful comments are the ones
| hidden.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| Profanity seems to do it. Even in a positive context. I have
| had it happen recently where I added a comment but it never
| made it into the comments. There was no error.
|
| There may have been the word shit in my comment. But it was
| polite and constructive. Meh. Makes me not want to bother and
| I don't.
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