[exodust]

> "...praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance"

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.