How do you regard ownership of, and responsibility for, YouTube comments?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I had an interesting conversation with someone the other day, who was very upset about some openly racist comments they saw under a video from one of their favourite creators; they contacted the YouTuber to discuss it with them, whose response was (words to the effect) ‘I’m just one guy running the channel in my spare time; I can’t control all of that’. This was not regarded as a satisfactory response by the complainant, who (I believe) decided to unsubscribe.

I think there are maybe three broad approaches to the notion of whose problem and responsibility it is to deal with (if at all), the comments section underneath YouTube videos; roughly as follows:

  1. The comments are a sort of community thing that is the purview of the channel owner; the channel owner moderates the comments.
  2. The comments, although they are attached to specific videos, are part of a community called ‘YouTube’, which is larger than any one channel; the comments, and to the extent anyone is responsibile for controlling them, that responsibility belongs to Youtube.
  3. The comments are part of the world in general and although they take place on the YouTube platform, they are just public speech.
    (this might not be a complete list)

There is also a spectrum of views on how free that speech should or should not be, which I was initially going to link to the options above, but I think it’s a separate thing - and ranges from something like ‘Nobody should try to control or restrict them at all’ to ‘They should be tightly controlled, with consequences for the wrong things’.

For my own channel, I do moderate the comments, to a standard that is somewhat similar to the moderation standards of the SDMB… but… that is possible for me because a) I have the time, capacity and inclination to do the moderation and b) the community of commentors for my channel is generally pretty nice and well-behaved (certainly in comparison to the comments on social media platforms in general), so it isn’t usually an onerous task.

However, I can certainly sympathise with the position of a spare-time channel owner who, say, posts a category of content that maybe attracts a higher proportion of trolls and assorted troublemakers, and who decides that for reasons of practicality, and for their own mental wellbeing, just decides to stay out of the comment section altogether and let it be whatever it is.

And I can also respect the position of a person who maybe takes a very serious line on free speech and believes that even the most heinous of comments should be left in place, in order to be shamed, ridiculed, corrected, and argued-with by others, and to serve as a public example of open discourse.

So I think I am saying that I don’t necessarily think the comments for all of YouTube fall exclusively into just one of the numbered categories I listed above, but maybe the answer to ‘what is the comment section?’ depends on choices made (or not made) by the channel owners, but what do you think?

Footnotes: The moderation UI provided by YouTube is pretty basic and clunky, and has worsened over the past couple of years; it’s possible to block a list of specific words, but that list only works for exact single-word matches (perhaps to avoid the Scunthorpe problem).
Comments that are automatically quarantined for moderation (either as a result of keyword blocking, or some other controls that are hidden within the YouTube workings) are difficult to handle because there is no simple way to find the comment thread in which they were posted (so you can’t always tell whether an angry-toned comment is attack or defence, for example).

2

My view is 4. comments are frequently a cesspool because comments are almost always a cesspool and anyone who’s surprised by this or tries to make a stink about it hasn’t been paying attention to internet comments.

I don’t mean to dismiss your thoughtful wrestling with the topic or your lengthy analysis. It’s honorable to try to form a perspective and weave a solution out of a difficult problem. But many, many people have struggled with it for literal decades and it’s still a largely unsolved problem. The reality is, the choice is between not having comments at all or accepting comments and risking the cesspool.

A message board like this succeeds because of active and aggressive moderation by many people. A comments section on youtube will (potentially) have much more traffic and many fewer moderators, comparatively, so relying on “comments police” is simply not plausible in all cases. You’re fortunate that your level of traffic and your viewer demographic makes this doable for you. For a solo creator dealing with bigger volume, it’s just too daunting.

People, in the wide aggregate, fucking suck. It’s sad but it’s true. I don’t know what to say to that complainant beyond that.

3

Some things are objectively terrible and should be moderated. Some things are objectively harmless and can be left alone. But that’s maybe 10% of all comments. The rest requires context, discussion, and sometimes a difficult decision has to be made (either keep it or delete it) and no matter what choice is made there is further controversy.

It’s so hard to know what to do, and some people will be upset either way.

4

Unless this person is getting thousands of comments on every video or has thousands of videos that he is putting out, I would have a mild expectation that he would go through and remove the worst comments. But I don’t think he has a moral imperative to do so.

5

How easy is it possible to for non-creators to alert the creator or YouTube of violations, the way we can flag comments here? If creators have to read every comment to determine their suitability, that is a huge burden to place on them. OTOH, it wouldn’t be pleasant to be viewing a presumably non-controversial video and suddenly come across hate speech. Not that hate speech is easily defined.

I guess I just don’t know enough about the ecology of YouTube to understand how comments as a whole are treated.

6

Whilst I don’t disagree with your conclusion, I think people, for the most part, are decent. It just doesn’t take very many sucky ones to spoil the fun.

7

And of course, the oft-mentioned anonymity (which is getting easier to breach every day) that emboldens the worst impulses among us. And equally ignoring the fact that the Republican focus on culture wars and the “I was joking” defense means that there’s little shame to be had in being ever more an absolute jerk.

Seriously, I’ve actually had a mitigation in my worst views about social media. It isn’t making us worse people, but it absolutely brings OUT the worst in people, if you grok the difference. I’m far more cynical than @Cervaise - We were always petty, mean, and shallow, but now those aren’t considered social sins - they’re marketable!

All that being said, I’m mostly on the middle ground about Youtube comments. Here’s a basic link on creator controls of comments:

A couple quotes:

On

When you choose to turn comments On, you’ll also have the option to choose if they’ll be held. You can tap the Comment moderation drop down to view your options:

  • None: Don’t hold any comments.
  • Basic: Hold potentially inappropriate comments.
  • Strict: Hold a broader range of potentially inappropriate comments.
  • Hold all: Hold all comments.

Can I block certain words, links, or users from one specific video?

No. Hidden users, blocked words, and link blocking automatically apply to all videos and to your channel homepage. Changes to your settings may also apply to new and existing videos.

Note: Changes to your comment settings only apply to new videos.

So it sounds like moderating a channel, especially if you have multiple videos on said channel, could very quickly get exhausting to manage and review in good faith - and with the cesspool mentioned above, I could easily see it be disheartening. Better to leave it on and shrug, or to leave it off and then have minimal feedback and support for your work.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if AI wouldn’t be pretty good at filtering stuff, but humans are stupidly, endlessly skilled at getting around rules and guidelines and patterns by using weird characters, euphemisms, and just out and out arcane shit like “88” references. Yeah, each can eventually be identified and cracked down on, but we endlessly create more.

8

Not that easy - anyone logged into YouTube can ‘report’ a comment - and that will do [some unknown thing] within the YouTube system and algorithm, that might include changing the weighting of how comments are filtered, it might add to some score that eventually has consequences for the person who made the comment. It hides the comment from the person who reported it, but this is cosmetic and also temporary - if you just refresh the page it reappears.

These reports don’t go to the channel owner and are not visible in any way to the channel owner - the only way to do that would be to contact them and have a conversation.

9

This is a really good point and it bears discussion. Fully moderating the comments means being there for all of them, which means potentially subjecting yourself to some pretty horrible personal attacks. That can be pretty bad for the mental wellbeing of the person running the channel.

Some people might say the solution to that is to grow a thicker skin and if you can’t handle people being horrible to you, you shouldn’t have a youtube channel, but IMO, that argument is usually based on very naive ignorance of cumulative effects and all in all, could be a bit victim-blamey.

I completely understand why a person might decide to never look at the comments under their videos. I think for a lot of channels that got big fast, they reached a point where they just said ‘enough’ and turned their backs on it.

10

This is, in part, why I opened this thread, because I think in the scenario I described in the opening post, the person making the complaint is seeing a bad comment and placing blame on the channel owner for the existence/persistence of that comment, so you’ve got a)complainant as victim and b)channel owner as injurer, when in fact, to the extent anyone is a victim in this scenario, it’s both of them, and the injurer is actually the person who wrote the comment.

11

IMHO this is not a reasonable expectation, unless the channel owner is known to diligently moderate the comments on all their videos—which may not be possible if those comments are numerous enough.

Classical music YouTuber David Hurwitz recently posted a video titled “What Is The Percentage Of Classical Music Fans That Are Obnoxious Jerks?” in which he reported that the percentage of his audience/commenters who are obnoxious jerks is 1%.

12

I should probably mention, since the complainant I mention isn’t here to present their own nuanced view, that their objection to the comments in question may have been deeply personal - for example if they have previously been the target of direct abuse of a type similar to that of the objectionable comments. This it may have run a lot deeper than taking offence at the words.

13

That might well be. But if so, then it amounts to a demand by that person that everybody else create a space safe enough for them, even if their perceived need for safety places them well outside the norm.

14

Could be, and there’s a lot of that about, but I mention it only to contextualise this example as possibly a cry of pain rather than a calm and dispassionate request.

15

Unless you are dealing with a plethora of comments, it strikes me as an obligation of the YouTube channel operator to remove the really vile ones.

Or if overwhelmed by the sheer number of comments, to remove the loathsome ones on being alerted by complaints.

16

They’re not obligated to remove bad comments.

17

For the person complaining about the comment that was posted, it would be interesting to find out how much they know about what it takes to create a video, post it, and all the other stuff that goes with running a YouTube channel. I suspect that the truth is that it’s a lot more time-consuming than I and that person really know. That viewer is the one who has to take responsibility for protecting their own feelings, and either just not read comments, or (as they apparently did) stop watching videos on that channel.

I myself don’t read very many comments, not because I might be offended, but because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low it just isn’t worth the time.

18

I think this is the crux of the problem. Unless people can be held accountable for what they say they feel emboldened to say the most vile things (not everyone but all too many). Why so many think it is ok or funny to say such things is another discussion. I wonder how many are young (or, better yet, an age breakout of the people making vile comments…race and religious affiliation would be interesting too)?

It’s not new but relevant:

19

More than likely they don’t realise. Most people don’t. For my own content, on average, it takes about an hour of work for every minute of produced video content.

Sometimes that ratio is lighter - if I’m making a video about a walk on the beach, the editing overhead may be quite low. Sometimes it’s very much the other way - for a video that needs a lot of planning and production, there might be 3 or 4 hours of work behind every screen minute of the published video.

And that’s just for my one-man operation making videos that in truth are not highly ‘produced’. Publishing videos totalling 60 minutes means I worked a 60 hour week, on average.

20

I’m trying to think of a real-world analogy that fits…

Maybe:
If you live in an apartment block, do you have an obligation to clean up graffiti that is left in the hallways and lobby?

I think there is no single right answer for this - it depends on whether you feel a desire and responsibility to create some sort of safe community space - if you do, then there is an implied duty (still not sure I’d call it an obligation) to keep the place tidy, but ‘listen man, I just live here; that doesn’t make me the janitor’ also seems like a fairly reasonable choice.