5 ms·

YouTube for the things I enjoy has improved dramatically because the comment section is vastly improved. Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of

YouTube for the things I enjoy has improved dramatically because the comment section is vastly improved. Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. Again, for me. One complaint: I like to upload interesting clips from this or that. I got my first copy right strike on a clip of Russel Brand talking to Terry Gross of NPR about life on heroin because I thought it was helpful for people. YouTube told me I could only get 3 strikes before they disabled my account, which I assume they mean they will disable my GMail. I can't have that so I don't upload interesting clips anymore. In fact, I don't upload anything since I don't want to lose my GMail. So the complaint is why didn't YouTube tell me when I uploaded it that I couldn't? I'd be ok with that. So I give Ms Wojcicki a people choice grade of B+ overall

michaelcampbell 4y ago
It got so bad that I have essentially stopped reading the comments. Ever.
bitcharmer 4y ago
Are you a real person? Because everyone in my circles have the exact opposite impression. Are you also of the opinion that Google search improved?
aeyes 4y ago
Nowadays the comment section on several channels I watch is full of spam, oftentimes 50+ fake accounts responding to each other in threads.
- labrador 4y ago
  I don't see that on the videos I watch. For example, this section from a song I recently listened to. Very nice comments. The Beatles - Within You Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck Do you see a bunch of spam comments? Maybe my ad blocker is blocking them?
  - david_allison 4y ago
    I see "Video unavailable" + "Comments are turned off"
    - labrador 4y ago
      Very strange. Yours must be from a different cache.
  - jahsome 4y ago
    I think the targets for the spammers are are generally influencers/solo creators. The spammers create imposter profiles to announce phony giveaways, or otherwise appeal to the creators' fan base.
    - johnnyanmac 4y ago
      Yup, I watch a lot of critic channels and gaming playthroughs and it's gotten obnoxious. I try to report a dozen but it's surprising they stay up to begin with. That seems like anti-spam 101, don't paste the same message with a suspicious link everywhere (even if it's using 70 burner accounts). Some even try to impersonate the creator, using some weird V to pretend to be a checkmark.
    - runevault 4y ago
      I see it on sports content too and not just solo. Feel like not long ago I saw the garbage on ESPN video comments but I don't pay much attention of late so maybe they went away?
  - bmarquez 4y ago
    I don't think music videos are the top target for spammers. Most finance videos (like general technical analysis, I don't watch crypto content) I watch are full of Whatsapp or Telegram scammers. Even a history channel I follow had to warn that the creator would never solicit money through Whatsapp or Telegram.
  - wildrhythms 4y ago
    Probably referring to the spam accounts that Marques Brownlee called out many months ago[0] tl;dw It's the fake accounts that impersonate the content creator and request users to privately message them. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RankingMember 4y ago
  Yeah I've seen the multi-account spam scripts way more lately, e.g. one person replies to someone with a vague bit of text with "By the way, does anyone know where I can download free movies and TV shows?" and then a confederate replies linking to some shitware site, then another replies to that person thanking them and reiterating the URL.
  - harambae 4y ago
    I've seen crypto/trading scams as the top comment on every single CNBC clip I watch. It follows the same pattern you describe with a vague opener that almost sounds legitimate (but not quite) and then the spam following in response. It's so reliable on CNBC clips that I almost think those videos comment sections could be used as a training set for spam prevention.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  And last time I looked (few months ago? and it had been so previous times I looked for at least the year before that) it was mostly trivially obvious spam, following simple patterns that will yield no false positives. This tells me that they don’t care at all: either they’re not doing any actual blacklist filtering based on content patterns (that is, unconditional removal or rejection, rather than merely flagging as probable spam for the channel owner to take action on), or their filters are unmaintained.
luckylion 4y ago
> Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. What do you like about it? Ever since they made comments a signal for discovery and openly communicated that, every creator and their dog will include call to actions to get viewers to comment some mindless nonsense, and users will happily oblige ("for the algorithm"). At least half the comments I see are completely useless. Then there's the censorship issue where they hide comments but do not adjust the count, so it'll say "2 replies", but none will show up because they're hidden. And last but not least ... it's has no useful nesting, just top comment and then everything else below it. With large audiences come hundreds or thousands of comments. Yet there's no structure. And you can't search in comments. So I'm really surprised that you think they've been improved much and are on a good level. What exactly do you like about them?
- labrador 4y ago
  I'm older and tend to have tastes that aren't current or worth marketing to. Maybe that's a good thing.
lsllc 4y ago
Agreed on the copyright issues! I got a strike for a short screen cast / video I made to demo a new feature I built to my boss -- it wasn't public, you had to have the link but I happened to feature some music (maybe 45-60 seconds) and it got taken down. Similarly I see YT content creators asking people to turn off their FM radios lest they end up with copyrighted music in their videos. Surely both of these cases are fair use?
- dbetteridge 4y ago
  They are but YouTube applies their own logic that is stricter than actual copyright law in most cases, just to avoid being sued into oblivion by media producers.
thenaturalist 4y ago
> I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. Again, for me. Teach me your secret to receiving good recos. The bad quality of recos is the total downturner for me. Nothing, absolutely nothing interesting for months. All that's being recommended is totally generic high view stuff, not at all related to my channels or content. Just a global dump of "what's being watched". No topical clustered recommendations of channels I haven't watched in the past or am not subscribed to. Good lord they have so much data. In my experience well over a year now, they fail miserably at recommendations.
- labrador 4y ago
  To my knowledge no one outside of YouTube has ever sat down to analyze the recommendation engine and figure out how to use it better. I mark things as "not interested" a lot. I also "like" videos. Maybe that's the difference.
- thethethethe 4y ago
  You can train the algorithm by saying you are not interested in videos or channels. I have told the algorithm to not recommend garbage channels with top 10 videos and my feed is much better now
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  Maybe you’ve got some garbage in your YT history? I’ve found recommendations to get insanely good in the last year. I’ve gotten a ton of channels whose views number <10,000 per video and they make chill or super interesting content. Start liking videos more and using the “don’t recommend channel” feature. I went hard on that feature for a day or two and I think it helped. It might be interesting to start a fresh account and figure out how to game the recommendations for specific types of content. I might do that this weekend.
- Roverlord 4y ago
  This Mitchell & Webb sketch is a pretty good summation of many of my recent Youtube recommendations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM?t=55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM?t=55
kderbyma 4y ago
D-
scriptsmith 4y ago
They're 'better' in tone, but for many videos the comments come across as very sycophantic which is a bit tiresome. That's not always the case though, so probably depends to some extent on the channel's community.
- function_seven 4y ago
  Yes, this. I’m sure many creators are happy to get a pile of praise, but it’s completely useless to me to pull up the comments on a video and see 90% “Wow, ur amazing. This is true talent!” The video often is amazing! The talent is many times top-notch! But I pine for the days of Slashdot, with their categorized moderation. You could hide all the “+5 funny” comments and only see the interesting or insightful ones. In the case of machining videos, I want to see how others solved an issue the video dealt with. Or alternative tools that could do the same thing cheaper. These comments do exist, but are often buried. And Google only lets you see additional comments in little dribbles.
- in3d 4y ago
  Yes. They’ve explicitly downranked criticism (they posted about it on Twitter maybe a year ago) and with the removal of downvotes, it’s much harder to quickly figure out how good is the video.
chillbill 4y ago
It’s weird. I can’t relate to what you’re saying in the slightest. Recommendations have gone from bad, to bad, then to bad again, to me. More and more the comments section strikes me as inauthentic and phony, at least earlier I’d get a chuckle out of some random comment now it’s only cringe. YouTube under Woncicki has been grossly inadequate when it comes to its sliding rules and random choices to ban things, unban other, changing rules on the fly and in other cases completely selling out both users and advertisers for god only knows whose agenda. YouTube had a real chance of being the true replacement for TV MSM, now it’s almost the same. The encouraged content is long, useless, and inauthentic, just like normal TV. You can find some interesting stuff from time to time but the opportunity they had was way larger, and they let it go because Woncicki wanted to provide as much and advertiser-friendly environment as possible, which in my opinion is short sighted. Advertising was going to come anyway as MSM is dying a slow death, all YouTube had to do is hold, but they buckled and sold short. IMO, YouTube is going in the wrong direction on almost all fronts. I only hope that they actually realize that they need to spin it off into a separate company away from Google’s enterprise BS. Ps to people downvoting: use your words.
nxten 4y ago
comment sections are filled with spam. amzcoin & ccp bots to be more specific
wraptile 4y ago
> YouTube for the things I enjoy has improved dramatically because the comment section is vastly improved. Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. I wonder if there some empirical evidence to support this because I'd argue it's much worse now. It went from "first" sort of harmless meme spam to real problems like encouraging conspiracy theories and criminal activities and toxic hate etc. Isn't that were most conspiracies like flat earth and covid crazies start? Not to mention the absurd amount of spam. Leave a comment on any tech video and you'll very soon find out "you won an iPhone!" sent by someone with the exact same image/name as the channel of the video.
londons_explore 4y ago
Make sure your clips are under 25 seconds and you won't get a strike.
londons_explore 4y ago
A YouTube account disabled for copyright strikes just loses the ability to upload videos. You get to keep your Gmail.
throwaway_9120 4y ago
Can’t really say if the YT comments section is fixed. I follow some stand up comics in India. In one glance you can make out that most of the top comments are fake.
roncesvalles 4y ago
If you're feeling nostalgic, you can get back the old dumpster fire comment section by changing the "Sort by" to "Newest first".
thatgerhard 4y ago
My biggest issue is algorithm that gets used for the user's landing page, a quarter to a third of that is things Ive seen before (with red bar at the bottom and not music), then at some point at the bottom of the page it just fills in another 2-3 rows with just a bunch from the same channel. There should be a consistent and easy way to watch things outside of your "bubble", e.g. they can fill that bottom section to show random "new" videos..
ManlyBread 4y ago
>I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. It is a completely horrible experience for me, bunch of same videos over and over again, often completely unrelated to what I'm watching now. I don't want a recommendation for some dumb shit when I'm watching a programming tutorial. I've spend over a year clicking "Not Interested" or "Block channel" over various topics only for them to suddenly come back and dominate the recommendation feed again. I've once visited a profile of a youtuber that hadn't uploaded in a decade only for ALL of his videos to suddenly start popping up in my recommended feed, even though I've seen them dozens of times already. Why did it assume I am interested even though I just briefly clicked on a bunch of videos? Is the top data-hoarding company in the world unable to tell causal browsing form an actual engagement? I still shudder when I think about the time I clicked a bunch of trashy meme videos and how they poisoned my recommended feeds for months. Once the algorithm decides you like something there's no way to stop it. I've asked for possible solutions and people were like "well go to your history and delete everything that might be causing this". Like really? I am supposed to dedicate time to curating my own browsing history for a chance of a non-shitty recommendation? I have no idea how this algorithm works in the first place, so why would I dedicate my time doing that? Isn't a browsing history supposed to reflect - well - the history of browsing rather than being a dataset for a ML model where the only metric that matters is a video click? Why can't I have a browsing history and get recommendations relevant to what I'm watching? Why does it all needs to be bundled together into an uncontrollable, non-customizable mess where no one knows how it works? I don't remember it being that bad in the 2010s and I won't even consider paying anything for anything related to YouTube until they make it good.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

It got so bad that I have essentially stopped reading the comments. Ever.

bitcharmer 4y ago

Are you a real person? Because everyone in my circles have the exact opposite impression. Are you also of the opinion that Google search improved?

aeyes 4y ago

Nowadays the comment section on several channels I watch is full of spam, oftentimes 50+ fake accounts responding to each other in threads.

labrador 4y ago
I don't see that on the videos I watch. For example, this section from a song I recently listened to. Very nice comments. The Beatles - Within You Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck Do you see a bunch of spam comments? Maybe my ad blocker is blocking them?
- david_allison 4y ago
  I see "Video unavailable" + "Comments are turned off"
  - labrador 4y ago
    Very strange. Yours must be from a different cache.
- jahsome 4y ago
  I think the targets for the spammers are are generally influencers/solo creators. The spammers create imposter profiles to announce phony giveaways, or otherwise appeal to the creators' fan base.
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    Yup, I watch a lot of critic channels and gaming playthroughs and it's gotten obnoxious. I try to report a dozen but it's surprising they stay up to begin with. That seems like anti-spam 101, don't paste the same message with a suspicious link everywhere (even if it's using 70 burner accounts). Some even try to impersonate the creator, using some weird V to pretend to be a checkmark.
  - runevault 4y ago
    I see it on sports content too and not just solo. Feel like not long ago I saw the garbage on ESPN video comments but I don't pay much attention of late so maybe they went away?
- bmarquez 4y ago
  I don't think music videos are the top target for spammers. Most finance videos (like general technical analysis, I don't watch crypto content) I watch are full of Whatsapp or Telegram scammers. Even a history channel I follow had to warn that the creator would never solicit money through Whatsapp or Telegram.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Probably referring to the spam accounts that Marques Brownlee called out many months ago[0] tl;dw It's the fake accounts that impersonate the content creator and request users to privately message them. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RankingMember 4y ago
Yeah I've seen the multi-account spam scripts way more lately, e.g. one person replies to someone with a vague bit of text with "By the way, does anyone know where I can download free movies and TV shows?" and then a confederate replies linking to some shitware site, then another replies to that person thanking them and reiterating the URL.
- harambae 4y ago
  I've seen crypto/trading scams as the top comment on every single CNBC clip I watch. It follows the same pattern you describe with a vague opener that almost sounds legitimate (but not quite) and then the spam following in response. It's so reliable on CNBC clips that I almost think those videos comment sections could be used as a training set for spam prevention.
chrismorgan 4y ago
And last time I looked (few months ago? and it had been so previous times I looked for at least the year before that) it was mostly trivially obvious spam, following simple patterns that will yield no false positives. This tells me that they don’t care at all: either they’re not doing any actual blacklist filtering based on content patterns (that is, unconditional removal or rejection, rather than merely flagging as probable spam for the channel owner to take action on), or their filters are unmaintained.

luckylion 4y ago

> Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. What do you like about it? Ever since they made comments a signal for discovery and openly communicated that, every creator and their dog will include call to actions to get viewers to comment some mindless nonsense, and users will happily oblige ("for the algorithm"). At least half the comments I see are completely useless. Then there's the censorship issue where they hide comments but do not adjust the count, so it'll say "2 replies", but none will show up because they're hidden. And last but not least ... it's has no useful nesting, just top comment and then everything else below it. With large audiences come hundreds or thousands of comments. Yet there's no structure. And you can't search in comments. So I'm really surprised that you think they've been improved much and are on a good level. What exactly do you like about them?

labrador 4y ago
I'm older and tend to have tastes that aren't current or worth marketing to. Maybe that's a good thing.

lsllc 4y ago

Agreed on the copyright issues! I got a strike for a short screen cast / video I made to demo a new feature I built to my boss -- it wasn't public, you had to have the link but I happened to feature some music (maybe 45-60 seconds) and it got taken down. Similarly I see YT content creators asking people to turn off their FM radios lest they end up with copyrighted music in their videos. Surely both of these cases are fair use?

dbetteridge 4y ago
They are but YouTube applies their own logic that is stricter than actual copyright law in most cases, just to avoid being sued into oblivion by media producers.

thenaturalist 4y ago

> I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. Again, for me. Teach me your secret to receiving good recos. The bad quality of recos is the total downturner for me. Nothing, absolutely nothing interesting for months. All that's being recommended is totally generic high view stuff, not at all related to my channels or content. Just a global dump of "what's being watched". No topical clustered recommendations of channels I haven't watched in the past or am not subscribed to. Good lord they have so much data. In my experience well over a year now, they fail miserably at recommendations.

labrador 4y ago
To my knowledge no one outside of YouTube has ever sat down to analyze the recommendation engine and figure out how to use it better. I mark things as "not interested" a lot. I also "like" videos. Maybe that's the difference.
thethethethe 4y ago
You can train the algorithm by saying you are not interested in videos or channels. I have told the algorithm to not recommend garbage channels with top 10 videos and my feed is much better now
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
Maybe you’ve got some garbage in your YT history? I’ve found recommendations to get insanely good in the last year. I’ve gotten a ton of channels whose views number <10,000 per video and they make chill or super interesting content. Start liking videos more and using the “don’t recommend channel” feature. I went hard on that feature for a day or two and I think it helped. It might be interesting to start a fresh account and figure out how to game the recommendations for specific types of content. I might do that this weekend.
Roverlord 4y ago
This Mitchell & Webb sketch is a pretty good summation of many of my recent Youtube recommendations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM?t=55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM?t=55

kderbyma 4y ago

D-

scriptsmith 4y ago

They're 'better' in tone, but for many videos the comments come across as very sycophantic which is a bit tiresome. That's not always the case though, so probably depends to some extent on the channel's community.

function_seven 4y ago
Yes, this. I’m sure many creators are happy to get a pile of praise, but it’s completely useless to me to pull up the comments on a video and see 90% “Wow, ur amazing. This is true talent!” The video often is amazing! The talent is many times top-notch! But I pine for the days of Slashdot, with their categorized moderation. You could hide all the “+5 funny” comments and only see the interesting or insightful ones. In the case of machining videos, I want to see how others solved an issue the video dealt with. Or alternative tools that could do the same thing cheaper. These comments do exist, but are often buried. And Google only lets you see additional comments in little dribbles.
in3d 4y ago
Yes. They’ve explicitly downranked criticism (they posted about it on Twitter maybe a year ago) and with the removal of downvotes, it’s much harder to quickly figure out how good is the video.

chillbill 4y ago

It’s weird. I can’t relate to what you’re saying in the slightest. Recommendations have gone from bad, to bad, then to bad again, to me. More and more the comments section strikes me as inauthentic and phony, at least earlier I’d get a chuckle out of some random comment now it’s only cringe. YouTube under Woncicki has been grossly inadequate when it comes to its sliding rules and random choices to ban things, unban other, changing rules on the fly and in other cases completely selling out both users and advertisers for god only knows whose agenda. YouTube had a real chance of being the true replacement for TV MSM, now it’s almost the same. The encouraged content is long, useless, and inauthentic, just like normal TV. You can find some interesting stuff from time to time but the opportunity they had was way larger, and they let it go because Woncicki wanted to provide as much and advertiser-friendly environment as possible, which in my opinion is short sighted. Advertising was going to come anyway as MSM is dying a slow death, all YouTube had to do is hold, but they buckled and sold short. IMO, YouTube is going in the wrong direction on almost all fronts. I only hope that they actually realize that they need to spin it off into a separate company away from Google’s enterprise BS. Ps to people downvoting: use your words.

nxten 4y ago

comment sections are filled with spam. amzcoin & ccp bots to be more specific

wraptile 4y ago

> YouTube for the things I enjoy has improved dramatically because the comment section is vastly improved. Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. I wonder if there some empirical evidence to support this because I'd argue it's much worse now. It went from "first" sort of harmless meme spam to real problems like encouraging conspiracy theories and criminal activities and toxic hate etc. Isn't that were most conspiracies like flat earth and covid crazies start? Not to mention the absurd amount of spam. Leave a comment on any tech video and you'll very soon find out "you won an iPhone!" sent by someone with the exact same image/name as the channel of the video.

londons_explore 4y ago

Make sure your clips are under 25 seconds and you won't get a strike.

londons_explore 4y ago

A YouTube account disabled for copyright strikes just loses the ability to upload videos. You get to keep your Gmail.

throwaway_9120 4y ago

Can’t really say if the YT comments section is fixed. I follow some stand up comics in India. In one glance you can make out that most of the top comments are fake.

roncesvalles 4y ago

If you're feeling nostalgic, you can get back the old dumpster fire comment section by changing the "Sort by" to "Newest first".

thatgerhard 4y ago

My biggest issue is algorithm that gets used for the user's landing page, a quarter to a third of that is things Ive seen before (with red bar at the bottom and not music), then at some point at the bottom of the page it just fills in another 2-3 rows with just a bunch from the same channel. There should be a consistent and easy way to watch things outside of your "bubble", e.g. they can fill that bottom section to show random "new" videos..

ManlyBread 4y ago

>I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. It is a completely horrible experience for me, bunch of same videos over and over again, often completely unrelated to what I'm watching now. I don't want a recommendation for some dumb shit when I'm watching a programming tutorial. I've spend over a year clicking "Not Interested" or "Block channel" over various topics only for them to suddenly come back and dominate the recommendation feed again. I've once visited a profile of a youtuber that hadn't uploaded in a decade only for ALL of his videos to suddenly start popping up in my recommended feed, even though I've seen them dozens of times already. Why did it assume I am interested even though I just briefly clicked on a bunch of videos? Is the top data-hoarding company in the world unable to tell causal browsing form an actual engagement? I still shudder when I think about the time I clicked a bunch of trashy meme videos and how they poisoned my recommended feeds for months. Once the algorithm decides you like something there's no way to stop it. I've asked for possible solutions and people were like "well go to your history and delete everything that might be causing this". Like really? I am supposed to dedicate time to curating my own browsing history for a chance of a non-shitty recommendation? I have no idea how this algorithm works in the first place, so why would I dedicate my time doing that? Isn't a browsing history supposed to reflect - well - the history of browsing rather than being a dataset for a ML model where the only metric that matters is a video click? Why can't I have a browsing history and get recommendations relevant to what I'm watching? Why does it all needs to be bundled together into an uncontrollable, non-customizable mess where no one knows how it works? I don't remember it being that bad in the 2010s and I won't even consider paying anything for anything related to YouTube until they make it good.