Lately I’ve been seeing no-like comments pop up near the top of popular videos, often with evangelical viewpoints.
Just thought I’d let you guyses know!
I switched to Freetube relatively recently and the experience is so much better. You can just completely get rid of the bad video recommendations, comments, clickbait titles/thumbnails, etc. Oh and the UI hasn’t randomly changed for the worse yet either.
Thank you for the reccommendation!
Why the fuck would anyone subject themselves to looking at YouTube comments?
I know YouTube has no competitor and is difficult to eliminate, but I would recommend that everyone should:
- use a privacy frontend like Invidious or NewPipe
- turn off comments
- turn off auto play next video and suggested videos
- always go to your subscription page and never the frontpage/popular videos/algorithm crap.
- YouTube should be treated like Imgur, you should not be browsing the site. If someone recommends or links something then you go directly to that video. Or you go to use the search bar and find something specific.
- never go there without an ad blocker and Sponsorblock enabled.
Edit: half the creators I followed were on Nebula and that’s helped me minimise YouTube in my life. I would highly recommend Nebula if it has content you like.
Though I generally agree with all of your bullet points, I will defend YT comments for a second. I follow some YTers that have a good community. I really hate calling it a “community” because it feels cult-y or something, but that’s what they call it. I follow a few people who talk about books and I have gotten a lot of my favorite reads from comments saying “X book is similar to the one you discuss but has better characterization” or something. I don’t really interact with the YT comment section, and I’m certainly not going to join a YTers discord, but sometimes it’s insightful. It’s hard with general book communities because you end up with a mix of people who think Twilight is peak literature and people who won’t read anything written after 1900. At least if we both listened to a 2 hour video essay comparing these two books I know their opinions align closely enough with mine and the YTer that I’m more likely to enjoy what they enjoy. I can’t tell you how often I would get a suggestion from a reddit book thread of if you like X try Y and the suggestion was maybe thematically similar but just a million times worse. Truly it’s like people think because two books are about space or a dog that you’ll like them both. It’d be like suggesting a book about Old McDonald to someone who enjoyed animal farm. Made me so unnecessarily upset that I stopped even bothering with Reddit suggestions. I still get upset thinking about the hours I wasted on truly awful books because of randos on Reddit.
Also, sometimes I’m unfamiliar with a video essay topic and depending on the YTer the comments are a good place to get clarity on points of confusion because I’m definitely not the only one with my questions.
I’m not the boss of anyone here. If anyone finds the experience of looking at YouTube comments to be beneficial to them, then please go ahead. I’d love to hear about people’s experience.
For me though, it’s not worthwhile:
👏👏👏
huh i usually see “top” by default and for low-traffic videos it’ll say 8 comments but only show me 6 and if i swap to new the hidden comments were some garbage that people probably downvoted
