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Comment by uejfiweun | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

Yeah this is my experience. Totally the opposite. Just people disrespecting and arguing in the comments section about nothing.

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> I'm starting to believe that whole NPC bots meme now (which is also pretty annoying, sorry).

Wasn't the initial engagement on Reddit the founders spamming under different names?

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.

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

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.

The last time I made a deliberate effort to read a YouTube comment was, I think, sometime around 2007.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

I admire the sarcasm

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