>Do you remember hiw bad YouTube comments have been?
Yes
>And it's significantly better lately?
It's gotten worse and a few youtubers I follow have simply disabled it in recent time (less than 1 month ago was the most recent one)
Normal conversation on youtube is barely possible since the algorithm randomly decides to not notify me of responses anymore or removes entire comments from my view that other people reference and I'm left wondering what is going on.
The only good thing about youtube comments is that I can remove them easily with a plugin.
> Normal conversation on youtube is barely possible
It's also interface. I've been notified of replies to comments, click the notification, and I'm not taken to the reply. This happens to me on mobile enough that I've basically just given up trying to engage for most things on youtube.
Happens on the desktop too. It's impossible to respond or follow up to anything on there. You'll get notified of unrelated comments, you're not able to respond to a specific person, everything is just in one parent thread. I've since blocked comments from even displaying.
Why are those bad comments? The first one is a bit ridiculous, but the others are fine. They're comments. They're not discussion points. YouTube isn't a forum or a social network. There's nothing compelling people to leave intelligent or even constructive points. The comment section is for people to note what they think. That's it.
When people say these sorts of things are bad I think it's because their expectations and understanding of a comments section are wrong.
It's just super repetitive, and actually good and original comments get buried because they don't match the hivemind.
Of course, it's a question of taste what comments should be more visible. If the community actually prefers reading the same stuff over and over again, then the current state is probably justified, and it's just a moronic community.
Depends what music you listen to. If you listen to smaller artists on videos that have under 1 million or 100k views you will see many more high effort comments talking about the band/band members or about their experience with the music.
e.g. "I got a chance to see these guys live in October, and [insert band member here] is actually a really cool guy. Talked to him afterwards and shared [so and so interaction]"
e.g. "This song was actually inspired by [such and such random factoid]"
[video has 28 dislikes]
7 people are morons!!!
9 people are sad they have no taste in music111
What is wrong with the 13 downvotes?
WHHHHHHHHYYYYYY don't 16 people have any taste?
Well it's obvious that 18 people don't have any taste.
21 downvotes can suck it!
22 people are morons!!!
WTF, 24 downvotes? There should be negative downvotes!
25 people are morons!!!
Well I see Hitler and his 26 closest friends have seen this video!
27 people are morons!!!
28 people hate don't appreciate art!!1
The comments got much better after Youtube added user ratings. Hardly "ML". I'm guessing they added ML later, but I haven't noticed any difference, to be honest...
And by "much better" I mean they went from amoeba level to early multi-cellular organism :)
Most of the bang for their buck was when they used a plain old sorting of those ratings. That already hid a lot of the sludge. The ML stuff is just a minor optimization compared to that.
Everything is just my opinion, of course, they're probably following a bunch of metrics I don't have access to and which could prove that the ML effort was worth it.
Yes
>And it's significantly better lately?
It's gotten worse and a few youtubers I follow have simply disabled it in recent time (less than 1 month ago was the most recent one)
Normal conversation on youtube is barely possible since the algorithm randomly decides to not notify me of responses anymore or removes entire comments from my view that other people reference and I'm left wondering what is going on.
The only good thing about youtube comments is that I can remove them easily with a plugin.