That floating and sinking takes volume though.
Both in the quantity sense that if a vid only has 5 comments, they’re all first-page, even if the last one is reviled by the folks who posted the first 4.
And also in the time sense that the more traffic a particular vid generates, the more people will see, and up- / down-vote the various comments. Thereby speeding the good to the top and bad to the bottom.
But a video with 5 comments is not onerous to moderate.
I just flipped through some popular videos from people i subscribe to. A couple of them can get thousands of comments. Most get 100-500 comments. And that count includes replies to “top level” comments. For most of those channels, moderating the top-level comments is a feasible job for either the YouTuber or a trusted moderator. Most comments are quite short, after all.
Reading about the limitations of the moderation tools, i agree that it’s not feasible for the creator who gets 20K comments to review every one. But for those creators, moderating the top 100 top-level comments is probably fine. I rarely get below the 50th top-level comment, honestly. (And i do routinely engage with the comments.) And unless you get a lot of viewers complaining about a lot of comments, i suspect it’s feasible (if tedious) to clear out the ones that aren’t at the top but that pissed off a viewer enough that they reached out to the creator.
So i guess I’m voting that the creator ought to moderator their site. I really do think the comments reflect on the site-owner.
I have seen a number of YouTube videos with the comments turned off. No idea if that can be opted for a whole channel.
It can, but it’s not necessarily a healthy thing to do in terms of channel growth.
I’ve seen a lot of older videos with comments turned off. They usually have comments from when they were new. I don’t think i see a lot of videos that never allowed comments. Probably, the algorithm doesn’t show them to me.
Yeah, it’s possible to pause comments (which leaves the existing comments in place but doesn’t allow new ones) or disable comments, which hides existing comments as well as disallowing new ones.
Also if videos are published with the ‘for kids’ option, comments are disabled.
The thing with moderating only the top or bottom comments is that the channel owner doesn’t see them in that presentation. They are arranged in a unified chronological feed for all videos, but the rank of the comment on the video is not obvious there.
It would be possible to moderate the comments by opening each recent video in turn and looking at them in the watch page, but that would be very laborious for someone publishing frequently
I just counted up and I think I get between 5k and 10k comments per month, very variable depending on the content type I publish and more than that if one of my videos happens to hit the trending page. I manage to read and moderate all new comments (just by scrolling down in the unified feed until I see comments I saw the day before).
One other factor to consider; unlike the moderation of a message board like this one, when you’re reading the comments on your own channel, the majority of them tend to be specifically about you - which is lovely when the comments are decent and normal (which they mostly are on my channel), but it can be a significant drain on mental wellbeing in cases where the comments are about you, and also hostile or threatening or personal in an otherwise negative way. This occasionally happens to me - I think when one of my videos gets shared somewhere on a forum where standards are lax or lower and I observe a sudden influx of unreasonable stuff, usually related to one specific video which must be the one that was shared. Other types of content than mine probably attract more of that sort of comment all the time.
It takes about a quarter million to a full million subscribers for YouTube to earn you enough to replace a decent full-time job. Sure some creators who are good at landing sponsor deals, merch sales, or Patreon contributors can make it work with less, but that seems to be the general rule of thumb. It’s also way past the point that they could possibly read, let alone moderate, all their video comments. For channels posting controversial content, it may only take a few thousand subscribers before the comment section becomes unmanageable. For more niche channels, maybe 100-200K subscribers is manageable for the creator to handle, but it seems like they only pay attention to the current video for a day or two at that point. The economics of hiring someone to moderate just doesn’t work out.
Yeah, I think the economics of it are such that employing a moderator might simply not be the first priority when the income increases - it might be (depending on the content type) that in order to sustain the growth of the channel, it’s actually an editor or a camera operator or an animator or something that is the first employed position.
Judging by the acknowledgements, video editors are the first staff hired.
I don’t follow YouTubers who post controversial content. I mostly follow Minecraft creators, cooks, and a few blacksmiths. And it’s a full time job for some of those, and they seem to be doing okay financially. They don’t get a ton of comments per video. Well, one does, but the others don’t.
I suppose the burden of dealing with comments must vary a lot from YouTuber to YouTuber, too.
Dealing with the comments has become easier over time, I suppose just because of experience (the tools to do it have worsened - for example I can’t search comments by username anymore - that feature disappeared about a year ago - so I can’t look at past comment history and I have to operate more on zero tolerance.)
But that makes things easier in a way. I used to waste quite a lot of time and energy trying to reason with people who ultimately weren’t there to be reasonable. Now the standard is more like 'do I want to deal with this person ever again? If not, they’re gone.