5 ms·

In my experience, if a video has comments disabled, it's probably bad. The lack of signal is itself a signal.

iso8859-1 5y ago
I have seen a lot of education videos having comments disabled, e.g. Oregon Programming Languages Summer School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8 I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there. They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I know K-12 educators who post videos primarily for their students and fellow local teachers, and they disable comments and voting because bored kids will fill the comments with crap, and scammers will target the kids.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    Yep. This sabotage is exactly why K-12 teachers disable comments.
  - sam-2727 5y ago
    In your case, this is because all videos "made for kids" must have comments turned off per YouTube policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Yes, but cause and effect are reversed from the teacher's perspective. They mark the video as "made for kids" because that's the easiest way to disable comments.
      - resoluteteeth 5y ago
        It's required to mark the video as made for kids if it's for kids.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Nitrolo 5y ago
  My first thought was that comments in many online spaces, including youtube, can simply be mean. If I was responsible for the online presence of a course I wouldn't want my lecturers to have to deal with random people commenting on their bad haircut or annoying voice, for example.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. It's an expense to have someone going through comments. Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform. McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space." There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev." You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
  - chongli 5y ago
    It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.
sireat 5y ago
Usually that is a signal but not always. Official Rammstein videos have comments disabled but for a different reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc would attract ugly comments from all extremes
- chana_masala 5y ago
  I figured it was Deutschland oder Ausländer that you would link. I agree
erickhill 5y ago
Many young content creators have comments disabled (or by parental decree) so they don't have to experience intentionally hurtful or negative trolling some comment sections are well known in spawning.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Not exactly young here, but I disable contents for this reason among many others. I will not make my own videos a platform for intentionally hurtful comments, off-topic arguments between commentators, or rants. Some other reasons: I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. Also, disabling comments helps me to communicate that they are not a channel I monitor for feedback or questions. I just don't have the time to monitor them, and in Youtube's case this means I either have a potential commenting cesspool on my hands or no comments at all. To some people this is a huge red flag maybe, but I would wonder if they really understand what it's like to be a publisher on the platform. Again and again I have seen good channels derailed by the absolutely broken commenter-publisher feedback loop...
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. It is not in the interests of almost any site or platform operator to limit drama, trolling, etc. They want the page views, the time spent in-app/on site, the emotional energy and investment. Look at celebrities. The job of their publicists is to negotiate with other publicists to manufacture some inconsequential tiff that puts the names of their clients in the media.
  - peakaboo 5y ago
    Hurtful comments vs censorship vs no discussion. You picked no discussion. So now nobody learns anything new from eachother and you turned YouTube into a TV channel with one way communication.
ngngngng 5y ago
There are quite a few tame religious videos that attract a lot of trolls and turn the comments off.
orangeoxidation 5y ago
It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time. Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.
- thrashh 5y ago
  While I personally haven’t noticed comments being on or off as useful, just because a signal could have multiple factors doesn’t necessarily render it useless. For example, a Yelp rating itself is useless until you also combine other signals such as the number of reviews, the type of restaurant, and the popularity of Yelp use in an area, and then I find Yelp ratings potentially very useful. Same with Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, or any scoring or review system.
Griffinsauce 5y ago
Sometimes but it often happens when a comment section gets brigaded as well. Negative feedback is not always given in good faith.
Quekid5 5y ago
You must not frequent the same subset of videos I watch. The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.
flyinghamster 5y ago
Or, the author doesn't want to bother with a brigade of trolls and spammers descending on it.
globular-toast 5y ago
Aren't the channel owners allowed to delete comments? So comments being enabled could mean it's a good video or it could mean the author is removing comments. You can't tell which it is.

I have seen a lot of education videos having comments disabled, e.g. Oregon Programming Languages Summer School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8 I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there. They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.

nitrogen 5y ago
I know K-12 educators who post videos primarily for their students and fellow local teachers, and they disable comments and voting because bored kids will fill the comments with crap, and scammers will target the kids.
- Wistar 5y ago
  Yep. This sabotage is exactly why K-12 teachers disable comments.
- sam-2727 5y ago
  In your case, this is because all videos "made for kids" must have comments turned off per YouTube policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Yes, but cause and effect are reversed from the teacher's perspective. They mark the video as "made for kids" because that's the easiest way to disable comments.
    - resoluteteeth 5y ago
      It's required to mark the video as made for kids if it's for kids.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Nitrolo 5y ago
My first thought was that comments in many online spaces, including youtube, can simply be mean. If I was responsible for the online presence of a course I wouldn't want my lecturers to have to deal with random people commenting on their bad haircut or annoying voice, for example.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. It's an expense to have someone going through comments. Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform. McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space." There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev." You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
- chongli 5y ago
  It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.

sireat 5y ago

Usually that is a signal but not always. Official Rammstein videos have comments disabled but for a different reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc would attract ugly comments from all extremes

chana_masala 5y ago
I figured it was Deutschland oder Ausländer that you would link. I agree

erickhill 5y ago

Many young content creators have comments disabled (or by parental decree) so they don't have to experience intentionally hurtful or negative trolling some comment sections are well known in spawning.

themodelplumber 5y ago
Not exactly young here, but I disable contents for this reason among many others. I will not make my own videos a platform for intentionally hurtful comments, off-topic arguments between commentators, or rants. Some other reasons: I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. Also, disabling comments helps me to communicate that they are not a channel I monitor for feedback or questions. I just don't have the time to monitor them, and in Youtube's case this means I either have a potential commenting cesspool on my hands or no comments at all. To some people this is a huge red flag maybe, but I would wonder if they really understand what it's like to be a publisher on the platform. Again and again I have seen good channels derailed by the absolutely broken commenter-publisher feedback loop...
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. It is not in the interests of almost any site or platform operator to limit drama, trolling, etc. They want the page views, the time spent in-app/on site, the emotional energy and investment. Look at celebrities. The job of their publicists is to negotiate with other publicists to manufacture some inconsequential tiff that puts the names of their clients in the media.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Hurtful comments vs censorship vs no discussion. You picked no discussion. So now nobody learns anything new from eachother and you turned YouTube into a TV channel with one way communication.

ngngngng 5y ago

There are quite a few tame religious videos that attract a lot of trolls and turn the comments off.

orangeoxidation 5y ago

It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time. Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.

thrashh 5y ago
While I personally haven’t noticed comments being on or off as useful, just because a signal could have multiple factors doesn’t necessarily render it useless. For example, a Yelp rating itself is useless until you also combine other signals such as the number of reviews, the type of restaurant, and the popularity of Yelp use in an area, and then I find Yelp ratings potentially very useful. Same with Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, or any scoring or review system.

Griffinsauce 5y ago

Sometimes but it often happens when a comment section gets brigaded as well. Negative feedback is not always given in good faith.

Quekid5 5y ago

You must not frequent the same subset of videos I watch. The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.

flyinghamster 5y ago

Or, the author doesn't want to bother with a brigade of trolls and spammers descending on it.

globular-toast 5y ago

Aren't the channel owners allowed to delete comments? So comments being enabled could mean it's a good video or it could mean the author is removing comments. You can't tell which it is.