Sure - it’s also the norm for comment sections to attract trolls - knowing that, a channel owner who just leaves the default setting can’t claim ignorance. Informed acquiescence is a kind of action.
It’s just an analogy, not an allegory.
So is a tenant of an apartment in a complex that has public access to the hallways and lobby, responsible for mitigating the graffiti that appears in those places?
When the tenant had the option to install and lock the doors, you mean?
No, there’s no practical option to install and lock doors, much like there’s no practical option to turn off comments.
Unrelated to this particular offshoot of the conversation; it is also probably worth noting that there may be a point at which, for a very popular channel, the comments may just become completely unmanageable because of the limitations of the tools provided - for example if comments are being added at a rate that outpaces the reading speed of one person, then no matter how many moderators you threw at the task, they all have to start at the most recent comment and scroll down manually; so they are highly likely to be duplicating each others effort quite unproductively, at the same time as new comments are being added faster than they can read them.
You raise an interesting point there. YouTube has designed their comment system to be a) commercially required, and b) unmanageable on any commercially reasonable basis. What is their obligation towards providing a comment system that can be managed? In landlord / tenant law the landlord has obligations to provide and maintain the property in usable condition. This is true whether we’re talking residential or commercial property although the details of what constitutes “usable” certainly changes between those two cases.
based on a few recent posts I’ll also argue that the [residential tenant in an apartment building] analogy is too narrow and therefore unhelpful. I live in an apartment building and while I have near total control of what goes on in my unit I also have zero legal right to exert any control, be it benign or malign, over what’s outside my unit door.
Which I why I offered the analogy of a business in a strip center. The business influences more than just what’s inside their walls. They may even control portions of the exterior such as dedicated parking spaces or outdoor seating areas. Those areas are both freely available to the public in general, but also under the legal control of the tenant.
I think that’s fair, and in truth I think analogies and similar devices can derail a discussion as easily as facilitate it.
I think this point is probably worthy of discussion and perhaps debate in its own thread. I can see the sense of it, but also wonder where are its limits.
My other thought on the OP is…
If you don’t have a strong and specific ‘moral objection’ to the objectionable comments, then I think an alternative would be to view comment moderation as a cold, cynical business decision.
To the extent that comments could be reasonably moderated, you’d evaluate what – if anything – you’re willing to do based on the % of comments that are ‘objectionable,’ your sense of how many viewers find them objectionable, and the cost of moderation.
IOW: does moderation cost you more than it likely saves you (in subscribers, views, any merch sales, word of mouth, etc)?
Moderation could be done by volunteers, by paid workers, and/or by you. The cost would be some combination of outright compensation, or – as in primarily your case – the opportunity cost of doing that (moderation) vs. other things, including things that make you money.
I’ve never looked at the comments on my videos and don’t plan on starting. And I don’t expect anyone else to on their videos. Alphabet makes that feature available for whatever reason (do people actually look at them?) and can do what they like with the content.
A few more technical details that may or may not be relevant but only just came to mind this morning:
When I report a comment as problematic, it isn’t deleted; it’s hidden from everyone except the person who posted it; similarly if I ban someone, it doesn’t delete their comments, it just means they are the only one who can see them.
On the one hand, that doesn’t send them any kind of message that what they posted was objectionable; they get no feedback or pushback.
On the other hand, that might be best on balance because if they do notice they have been shadowbanned, some people will probably just open a new account and carry on from there.
These ban/report/hide functions are local; they apply only to the context of the individual comment (in the case of a comment reported by the channel owner) and the commentor’s ability to post on this specific channel (in the case of a ban by the channel owner); none of this prevents them from posting similar problematic comments on other videos from other channels.
There may be some aggregation of reports that YouTube acts upon, to restrict the posting rights of a person who gets reported multiple times independently, but if there is, it’s not very consistent or strict.
So none of the moderation features or options really deal with the root cause of the problem; they just make the very localised symptoms go away. I’m not sure if this is good or bad; there could be arguments that the comments would be better left in place and mocked, scorned, refuted or otherwise addressed by other members of the public (the analogy with graffiti breaks down here, because unlike graffiti, comments can be readily replied to, and there is a fair chance the commentor will see the reply via notifications).
But if it’s just something a person is doing in his spare time, then why does he care if his channel takes a nose-dive?
Many people hope that the spare-time occupation will develop to full-time; it used to be the most common route to YouTube success, I think.
But in a more general sense, I don’t even think ‘why do you care about this thing you obviously care about enough to spend time doing it?’ is really even a question.
Then if it’s this person’s plan to develop his channel to full-time, I would think that monitoring comments would go with the territory. (I’m not a professional Youtuber, just my two cents.)
Fair enough, I think that makes sense, if monitoring the comments is a duty or obligation at all, which is the part that is debatable.
I don’t usually read comments, mainly because I assume any witty comment I had to make was already made by a far wittier person, but I am of the general opinion that it’s not really the channel host’s fault/issue. I wouldn’t expect even a small-time operator to continually monitor on each video they’ve done. I suppose if I brought it up and the host declined to hide an obviously vile comment with “Oh well” I would think less of them but it’s unlikely I’d bother to even report it. There might be edge cases like there only being ten replies and the host liking seven of them showing that they were obviously engaged but, in a general sense, it’s just an unfortunate bit of the internet.
I watch a lot of YouTube videos. Enough that I’ve decided to pay YouTube. (And i hope the content creators i watch are still being paid.) And i often read and interact with the comments. Sometimes, that’s an important part of the content. (This was a tutorial for building a Minecraft shulker farm in version 1.18. Does it still work in version 1.21? What changes do i need to make?) Sometimes the YouTuber asks a question and replies to answers. Sometimes i want to respond to the YouTuber or other commenters in some way.
Good to know. That explains why the limited number is choices doesn’t include things a channel owner might want to know, like, “off topic” or “this is untrue and will ruin your cake”. I’ve tried to report a couple of YouTube comments, but never actually done so because the reporting system is set up to report stuff YouTube might want to know with no channel context, not anything that depends on the channel content.
How would i contact the channel owner? Not that I’m likely to do so.
I don’t know the economics of YouTube. If my channel is that successful, can i afford to hire a moderator? Can i give moderation powers to a volunteer i trust?
I think i would take my channel as a reflection on me, and as a garden i create and offer for the use of others. I would want to moderate comments if i possibly could, and would probably turn off comments or stop posting if i couldn’t maintain a garden to my liking. Of course, i can’t imagine myself trying to make a living by posting YouTube content, for any number of reasons.
Fwiw, “making this person’s comments always invisible to everyone but him” counts as “banning this person from the comment section” in my books. I’m indifferent to whether he sees his own drivel. It’s probably more practical to ban bad actors from the garden than to attempt to teach them to clean up after their dog.
It used to be the case that you could contact people directly (including other commentors) via a messaging thing in their profile page; that went away quite a long time ago - now you can only contact people on YouTube either by interacting with them in the comments (which they may never even see if they have notifications turned off), or in the case of channel owners, via the contact channels they have set up and decided to publish in their ‘about’ page.
But there’s no mandatory requirement to set up any channel of direct contact and indeed, I removed mine from my channel because the only people who were contacting me were sponsors, wanting me to shill their product/service (not interested), agencies and ‘channel networks’ wanting to take a cut of my revenue in return for dubious or imaginary services (hell no), and scammers pretending to be sponsors and agencies etc.
Yes - there is what appears to be a rudimentary permissions model and one of the levels within that allows people to be given rights to moderate comments, but make no other changes on the channel - in terms of performing that job though, there’s no reporting function - the moderators would just have to manually sift everything to look for the bad stuff - it would be the approximate equivalent of tasking you with the responsibility of continually reading and monitoring all of the threads in the forums you moderate, and noticing that someone is misbehaving somewhere.
Even when someone contacts me (via my website, where I still keep a form open for contact), to report a problem in the comments, it’s still very difficult for me to locate that actual comment, especially if it is happening in replies to an original comment that is quite old.
Yes, if there’s no way to tag a comment for attention, I’m not going to bother a channel owner about stuff like, “there’s an annoying guy trying to evangelize in your ‘here are updates to Minecraft’ video”. Nor about the guy suggesting you leave out the eggs in cake because chickens are being abused. Just not worth it.
I did once report (to YouTube, i guess) a really racist comment, that was also off-topic. Just a turd floating in the pool. I wonder if YouTube is like (default) Discourse, and if enough viewers report the same post it’s actually hidden from all, or something useful.
In the early days of Youtube, comments were an afterthought and the comments were indeed a cesspool and was one of the worst social spaces of any large platform. But they’ve put serious investment into the comment system over the years and it’s actually become among the very best at surfacing great contributions.
I absolutely do judge creators by the quality of their comments because it’s a reflection of their viewership and who they’ve been trying to target.
Sure, if you scroll several pages deep, you might find a bunch of vile, unhinged stuff that barely anyone sees but within the top 100 or so comments, I expect the creator to be there actively curating the space and dictating what’s acceptable and unacceptable behavior. I want to see them engage and encourage more from high value commenters and explicitly disclaim or remove comments that don’t fit the ethos they’re going for.
This is an interesting point because I never really look at the comments in this way on my own channel - YouTube Studio consolidates them all into a single chronological feed - so the nuances of bad comments sinking out of sight and good ones floating up is something I hadn’t really thought about.