[cphajduk]

Doesn't have to even be that complicated. Remember when YouTube comments used to be a dumpster fire?

I'm pretty sure YouTube is doing sentiment analysis on all comments and artificially promoting the ones that tend to be positive.

[rockskon]

This practice leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Presents an inauthentic vision of what people are.

Anger and other negative emotions are part of the human condition. Suppressing their expression doesn't change the underlying issue that caused the emotion.

Makes YouTube feel more inauthentic and bland.

[kibwen]

The prior algorithm was also "inauthentic". There is nothing about anger or negative emotions that are inherently more authentic than positive emotions. And because anger tends to increase engagement (be less "bland"), algorithms tend to amplify anger artificially in order to juice their own metrics. This is why Twitter was a shithole even before Musk took over.

[rockskon]

Why do you speak as if the human condition experiences only positive or only negative emotions?

It's everything. Trying to stifle any of them leads to a bastardized experience.

And YouTube comments used to be more raw and unfiltered than the constantly-promoted rage-bait that has defined Twitter for much of the past decade.

[chongli]

I think Google is doing this to protect creators. There have been a lot of people speaking out about burnout and severe mental health struggles on YouTube for a while now. A big contributor to this is toxic engagement from the community. Some people get very upset when they see a whole bunch of negative comments directed at them.

You might want to say “these people should just suck it up” but that’s not a road Google wanted to head down. They see healthy and happy creators as more productive and hence more profitable. Hiding downvotes and sentiment analysis on comments are two ways they can protect creators from this stuff.

[rockskon]

I call shenanigans on that.

I constantly see creators stress over unclear guidelines from YouTube with inconsistent enforcement on what content is or is not allowed or will or will not be monetized.

If YouTube's priority was creators they'd give clearer guidelines to creators and broaden the range of personal expression that can still get ads put on it.

No - YouTube's push for positivity at all costs is to appease investors and media critics who've complained about comments and downvote campaigns and to appease advertisers who were seriously uncomfortable with the media attention given to them during the initial media push for the adpocalypse.

[pimlottc]

It's concerning, yes. But before this, YouTube comments were complete toxic garbage fire for _years_. It's definitely a much nicer experience than it used to be.

[worthless-trash]

A very good reflection of humanity to be honest. Without this, I fear that small deviations from positivity will be met with downvoting and hate.

[sznio]

> Presents an inauthentic vision of what people are.

People present an inauthentic vision of themselves in real life. They just limit themselves out of social self-preservation.

They don't do that online, so we need machines to pick up the slack.

[d-us-vb]

that's only if you're viewing "people" as a whole. If you instead view each commentor as an individual, it only makes sense that you would promote what improves the health of your service and punish those who stir up strife.

In general, anyone can find some reason to criticize even the best things, and if there's one lesson humanity can take from social media it's that negativity and cyber-bullying is contagious. I am completely in favor of YouTube for creating a comment section that I actually enjoy reading; one that enhances the video-watching experience. Not even a single flavenoid of bad taste in my mouth about this.

[throwawaysleep]

People suck. Unfortunately for the authentic types, nobody wants a product that sucks.

[AlexandrB]

People suck online. It's rare to have interactions IRL that are as bad as what you see in the old Youtube comments section. So which is more authentic? How people behave in person or in unfiltered comments/fora?

[worthless-trash]

People suck in real life too, there is a threat of getting a punch in the face in real life that prevents troll behavior.

[medvezhenok]

I think that's part of it, and part of it is that we curate real-life interactions a lot more than online. There are plenty of places I would never show up to / people I wouldn't talk to in real life (precisely because they would be the sort of people who troll online).

Whether that filtering is done explicitly or implicitly (i.e. neighborhood wealth)

[worthless-trash]

Thanks for highlighting that point, the geopolitical filter,along with 'physical availability' (as you stated) are likely larger contributing factors than I had initially considered.

[dredmorbius]

People suck online and off.

People suck far more in some environments, online and off, than others.

Which is to say: there's an inherent potential for sucky behaviour, but there are specific circumstances which really seem to amplify and trigger it.

Something like locusts: a behavioural transition of a species under the right environmental stimulus.

Brief (<4m) videos, NatGeo: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=uURqcI08IC4>, also PBS: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=dt6zCJ2VHok>, and Attenborough/BBC: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lAI6W2TOkh4>.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22206555>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239835>

It's pretty clear that the people who engage in toxic behaviours online are no different than they were prior to the emergence of those environments. It's the environment itself which triggers that behaviour.

That's baked into HN's philosophy:

"As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>

One of dang's fairly frequent observations is that HN tends to operate at the edge of chaos:

- "if moderation doesn't evolve as a community grows, one ends up with the default dynamic of internet forums: decay followed by heat death." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435202> (2019)

- "it's almost impossible to keep this place from collapsing" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164049> (2023)

- "Trying to keep the bottom from falling out on a public forum is harder than it perhaps sounds." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9712216> (2015)

- "[T]he internet doesn't do such fine distinctions. Please just keep away from that rail." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605136> (2017)

- "If 500-point stories on hot topics were dispositive, HN would be a 500-point-stories-on-hot-topics site. It isn't that kind of site, and intervention is required to keep it from going that way." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14306144> (2017)

- "Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34025076> (2019)

- "It's hard enough to keep these threads from incinerating themselves" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436973> (2022)

- "The important thing is to keep the site from burning in the first place." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445> (2021)

[grpt]

> pretty sure YouTube is doing sentiment analysis

could be. I think it's mainly the phone number requirement within the past few years. The bad accounts have washed out. It's also likely why Google will soon delete old inactive accounts, created before this policy.

[trustingtrust]

Positive or negative ? Positive comments don’t generate interaction. If a comment was positive I’d like and move on not comment. Negative comments in the other had generate a lot of interaction. If I was to guess, Google as a marketing company loves interaction.

[dredmorbius]

Engagement is a really poor proxy for value.

I've had an awful lot of engagement that's produced little value. (As I get older, I try to avoid that, increasingly. Not always successfully.)

I've had tremendous value from some very brief engagements, often one-liners or casual remarks, though also when someone shares a deep knowledge of a subject or a truly insightful personal experience.

Those are all exceptionally valuable, but in terms of "engagement metrics" such as replies, time-on-site, etc., they're often negatives. To turn a phrase: feed a person endless questions and challenges, and you'll keep them on site for a day. Provide them the answer or tools they need, and they disappear forever.

(Dating / matchmaking sites face a related version of this problem.)

With time, people who do value useful information come to realise the timesuck nature of high-engagement, low-value sites (o hai redditz) and avoid them like the plague.

Side observation: I'm playing with FastGPT (largely because it doesn't require registration to use, so I can't compare it to ChatGPT or other registration-required generative AIs), and one of the things that's useful about it is that it gives specific answers to specific questions, rather than sending me off on an endless quest through low-grade online sources.

Or even relatively high-grade ones such as Wikipedia, which might answer the immediate question but tend to prompt more. Curiosity ain't necessarily bad, except for cats....

What generative AI does that General Web Search does not is actually quench the thirst. Which is useful from a personal value perspective, though possibly a shock to the system for both online search and content providers.

[thejazzman]

I believe their point was that we no longer see as much nonsensical hate in YouTube comments anymore - or at least that rings true to me and I've actually wondered about it for awhile

[wordpad25]

You min/max for engagement, but get a local max with negativity, so you increase your variability to find another peak

[_Algernon_]

So that's why every comment has seemingly become a variation of "Can we all just appreciate the effort that X puts into their videos"? I guess it is better than flame wars but that's a low bar. These comments are just as uninteresting to read as the flame wars they replaced.

[scrollaway]

It is better than flame wars, so unless you have a suggestion, I don’t know what else they could do.

But I disagree with your premise. I know several YouTubers with reasonably large communities that have incredibly fun and wholesome interactions in the comments, mainly made possible by this sentiment analysis. Negativity and positivity both have feedback loops. If you display negativity, people will be more negative; if you display positivity, people will be more positive.

[_Algernon_]

>I don’t know what else they could do

They could remove the comment section entirely. They've had some version of a comment section for almost two decades now and at no point during that time have they succeeded at cultivating a platform wide culture for interesting comments.

Flame wars were obviously bad and negative. Generic positive comments are slightly better but they still do not say anything interesting related to the content of the video.

At this point, comments could just as well exist out-of-band on other platforms that have figured out how to foster discussions better (hint: extensive manual moderation is required, which Google will never provide).

[Aerbil313]

> They've had some version of a comment section for almost two decades now and at no point during that time have they succeeded at cultivating a platform wide culture for interesting comments.

I'd propose there is no need for a public comments section. I honestly don't understand this feature creep.

[scrollaway]

You can't call it feature creep if it's been there since literally day 1.

Some channels use the comment section extensively. PBS Space Time for example does a Q&A almost every episode where they answer questions posted as comments from previous videos.

[jen20]

Almost certainly this would negatively impact some engagement metric that is tied to someone’s sense of self worth, and this will not happen despite being clearly the best thing for the product.