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by stametseater
1148 days ago
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I think the comments have become much worse. Good channels used to have good comment sections where people had normal reasonable discussions about the topic of the video, but these days it seems like nearly every channel's comment section is filled with sycophantic noise, praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance. Of course I'm not talking about the comment sections of music video channels or provocative video essayers or front page youtubers like pewdiepie. Those were always abominable crap. I mean the small channels of that make niche but thoughtful content, that appeals to people with those niche interests. These sort of channels used to have good comment sections, not the spam and flamewars that people talk about when they say youtube comments were crap. Most of that is gone now, sacrificed for the 'greater good' I guess. The good got ironed out with the bad, and now everything is bland. Just for instance, railfan videos (e.g. people who watch trains.) The comment sections used to be people giving personal anecdotes about interesting trains they had seen, or their uncle who worked on a similar train, various comments of that nature. Now it's all "Very interesting!", "Another excellent video", "Love these videos, keep them coming", "Great video Danny." |
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Exactly this. Many videos contain a deluge of comments that sound like they came from a praise vending machine.
I watched a short video recently about a gadget review. It was extremely basic, not informative. All the comments mentioned nothing about the topic and instead went into gushing mode, praising the creator with copy-paste lines such as "you deserve more subs" etc. Often from profiles that have no content, and look to be spammer accounts.
Spammer profiles and bots are exploiting the high-ranking "positive but empty comment" in order to increase chances of engagement on their own profile by dominating the "top comments". This is why I switch the sorting to "newest first" to avoid the fake top comments.