effort

I'm being a real boomer here, but facebook (and by extension Instagram) is easily the worst place on the internet for me. I can't curate my content in any way and most of what I get on my feed is garbage mainstream "culture" war bullshit and libertarian pages. Like I get 20 different libertarian/right-wing posts recommended to me for every one leftest post. And I know I have high school/work acquaintances that are right wingers, but I know it can't be significantly more than the average lib or leftists that I know..

huh most of the youtube comment sections i actually look at are decent, and i don't get recommended gore or rightwing shit.

i've only clicked on trending by accident and i don't watch shorts... i hear about stuff like elsagate or what OP is reporting but my account is pretty under control. like i used to watch a bunch of slay the spire videos and after clicking "don't recommend channel" on three of them it stopped recommending them to me

Reddit is frustrating because it's a site of people who think themselves to be intellectuals saying the stupidest shit. Youtube is full of people who know they aren't intellectuals and don't care. Combine that with organized commenting brigades and you have a right-wing cesspool. The type of people who comment usually have an axe to grind and will more likely be some kind of right-winger if they aren't a stan of the Youtuber they're watching.

The comments on videos about the Israel-Palestine conflict have actually been better than Reddit's from what I've seen.

Both suck, but redditers are uniquely smug in a way that makes every dumb thing they say a million times more insufferable. Anyone who adds ´fuck around and find out’ to the end of their racist screeds probs works for that army base that was voted most Reddit obsessed way back in the day.

But on YouTube you get so many weird comments like,

"I don't know who you are or where your from or your life, but don't worry. Things will get better. We are connected by music in this beautiful world, and you have yet to sing your song. Peace"

Who is the bearded man, and why is YouTube using him as a weapon to attack my sanity?

I'm of the opposite opinion. I think Reddit is worse than Youtube. Youtube comments tends to stay on topic, for lack of a better word, while Reddit would always find ways to cram their reactionary bullshit. Youtube comments on a video about knitting would just be about knitting while Reddit comments on a Reddit post about knitting would somehow find ways to shoehorn how China is evil or various other US state department talking points. Plus, Youtube is a lot more international than Reddit, which is full of Anglos.

YouTube comments are regularly Nazi-level shit on anything even remotely political. Reddit is like one tiny step above that and assuming your response doesn't get deleted you can actually embarrass them potentially whereas libidinal drivel is the only thing that thrives on fashtube.

I now see that the big sites - reddit, "X" and YT are majorly astroturfing. I've seen a couple of good youtubers who had history degrees under their belt give up on the site as it doesnt like the holocaust stuff. Real history and science is being buried. The stuff that appeals to the algorithm tends to be the conspiracy junk, the fake news and the "free energy" claptrap. They are just breeding grounds for this shit

In the weeks after I got myself banned from twitter on purpose to force myself to quit getting into stupid internet arguments, I found myself arguing with people in YouTube comments instead. Out of the frying pan, into the Vietnam-era cancer burn pit

yeah it's fucked - my trained profile is nice, has helped me find a bunch of interesting music recommendations. Then I open it not logged in and see the faces of Piers Morgan and Mr Beast spread across my screen like the wailing souls imprisoned in Hell

Feel like there's a distinction between YouTube and the comments.

"Looking like a YouTube comment section" has been a way nondescript cesspits of comment sections since like 2004, the actual videos you can get everything from chuds whining that Disney movies don't uphold Roman archetypes but you can also get people in thigh high stocks role-playing in disco elysium.

In summation YouTube is a land of contrasts.

I just can't believe there's actual human beings that waste time using YouTube as a forum of discourse, at some point it just has to be the project of some bored chuds creating racist ass chatbots endlessly spamming every video with some type of shit take.

The algorithm is shit though and will, without a second, recommend the most heinous shit especially if you show any interest in politics (YouTube be like "oh you watch leftist videos like Second Thought? How bout some Jordan Peterson!!!").

I think a lot of people here are blind to it because they spend so much time on it, but Twitter is fucking awful.

I've never used it, but sometimes I click on links that are posted here, and my god it just seems fucking miserable.

There was a post yesterday asking who we should target for bullying... What if we had campaign days where we all got on to YouTube and trashed comenters in Jordan Peterson videos or something. Just decend on the comment section like a plague of locust, not focusing on trying to argue intelligent points, just slaughtering hogs and diving them out piece by piece.

These chuds are usually raised in their rhetoric in places like 4/8chan and they really don't have the same ability to cut as someone who is informed by a materialist perspective.

I don't think it's anything that would benefit the world, just some fun chaotic content for our own amusement. Might get a few to rage quit, idk.

Either way, YouTube is a cesspit, but it's the site I'm on the most. I learn a lot of stuff on there and have taken a lot of time to curate my own feed.

Youtube is like an open latrine. You simply don't have to go swim in there.

Reddit is like a mall full of awful yuppie stores with one or two cool little stores in there. You have to wander through just the most tedious places to find the little bit of good stuff.

at least I learn shit on youtube, I never got anything positive out of reddit

i've gone too hard in youtube comments, they definitely have me tagged or shadowbanned or something. there's like 95% chance of my comment just not appearing no matter what i write at this point, which is honestly fine. my mental health improved dramatically when i stopped engaging fucking losers in the comments

I find that if you report the content for hate speech (it almost always is), dislike it using an add-on that returns dislikes, and click not interested, the algorithm avoids showing you that type of thing. I used to get that crap on my YouTube homepage all the time, but after doing this for a while I don't see it anymore.

The default YouTube homepage sucks though. Mr Beast, Jordan Peterson, American sports and politics, and hateful crap all over.

YouTube, like so many of humanity's works, is a land of contrasts. Yes, there's a ton of incredibly noxious assholes flooding the comments with absolute garbage. But every so often I'll be playing a video (read: listening to a song; that's what I use YouTube for), looking through the recommendations along the right side, and I'll glance over and see someone's comment talking beautifully about how this song kept them from committing suicide, or helps them to stay sober despite deep mental anguish, or how it brings back memories of a lost loved one who used to enjoy it (these range from laments about a lost parent who loved the song to brutally sad stories like the one about someone's brother who pointed them to a song about fighting addiction, and later died of an overdose), and I will just break down and weep right there at my computer.

I have never seen any of the content you are talking about on YouTube. My "front page" is mostly movie essays, music production, some standup comedy, and tech reviews mainly from GamersNexus. I'll agree the comments can be ass sometimes but that's also dependent on the size of the channel and content of the video. Just out of curiosity do you have an account and subscribe to channels?