I extensively watch music videos and live music performances on youtube, comments are fun to read. Not sure they are completely necessary but i've learned some interesting things and been turned on to good bands from YT comments!
I watch lots of hobbyist how-to videos and the comments are usually pretty nice. At the very least they are some human engagement from the views to the author, without which making/posting videos would seem pretty lonely.
Could be a function of what you watch. I frequent cricket/soccer/indian music videos which match your experience. Other things like VASAviation are filled with awesome comments.
This very much depends on what part of YouTube you tend to be in. Much like any online massively-used portal, different segments of videos will attract vastly different users and types of comments. There is somewhat of an over-generalization of YouTube comments, where the description of toxic comments seems more accurately applied to truly /viral/ videos: those that have broken beyond normal segment boundaries, and where the 'best' comments are perceived to be those that draw the greatest reaction, as opposed to genuine commentary on the video itself.
I'm surprised they don't just disable comments for viral videos, too.
Now that I think about it, imagine the equivalent of that for other services. For example, imagine if all of Reddit's "default" subreddits (the ones that make up the front page when you're not logged in) had no comments attached to posts. To get comments, you'd have to opt into a community. (Which might very well just be a post-for-post mirror of a "default" community, but with comments enabled.)
I've found that comment quality is pretty reliably proportional to the specificity of the audience niche. I also have the hunch that any meaningful algorithmic comment moderation would have to approach being a general be AI. Might be room for advancement in machine assisted moderation though.
Low quality channels have low quality comments. High quality channels have high quality comments. I feel a bit embarrassed for people who claim they've never seen a good comment on youtube.
Here are two examples I came across a few minutes ago:
> Grady, to gain a variable flow control, could you use the horizontal angle of a folder weir? If the point of the folded weir was say 5 degrees higher than the outer sides, a slow flowing river would only flow over the lowest parts of the crest. As the flow increased, more of the weir's crest is used by the water, This would effectively self regulate the weir's geometry.
response:
> Such structures exist and they're called compound weirs. These structures come in various cross-section geometries which can be tailored to provide better control of water levels under various discharge rates. The structures discussed with a fixed crest height, also have a fixed relationship between the upstream water level and discharge capacity.
I think that's an interesting exchange, don't you? Nobody is tossing around profanities, neither claimed the earth is flat, called the other a 12 year old, or anything like that. Insightful and constructive comments are common on decent channels, and non-existent on trash channels. That's not really a reflection of how youtube works, but probably a symtom of something more fundamental about human nature.
There are a few channels -- Ben Krasnow's 'Applied Science' comes to mind -- where the commenters tend to be well-informed and supportive.
But yes, in general YouTube commenters are enough to make one question the long-held conventional wisdom that a nuclear war would be a bad thing. I don't envy the people at Google who have to support and maintain the commenting system on YouTube.
