An Experiment With YouTube Comments…

I wonder if this will hurt "engagement" metrics with YouTube, since commenting is one of the ways creators usually drive engagement and get their videos in more of the suggested feeds

YouTube needs to give us a way to disable shorts. I don’t want to see them, but they always end up taking away hours of my time.

For years I’ve been a student and thus banned from becoming a Bonnie Bee. I’m finally in a financially stable place outside of school and so I’m so happy to be a Bonnie Bee.

I love being part of exclusive content.

Blue ticks are out, being allowed to comment on CGP Grey videos is in as the internets new status symbol

God, I hate those bots. So glad you’re doing something about it!

Feels awkward since my username was already “bee” before this, but this finally encouraged me to join. What Grey said about YouTube favoring shorts at the cost of long-term videos really hit home with me. I guess YouTube was trying to rival tiktok with their mindset behind as they offered up to a 10,000 dollar bonus depending on how well it did. As such, minimal effort, low quality content that can be pushed easily for views gets shown to viewers. Meanwhile, high quality, high effort content often suffers at the cost of it and hardly sees anywhere near as much SEO. It’s frustrating, but it’s the nature of things I suppose. Still, it’s amusing to me how I’ve seen certain content creators upload a short, wait a couple months, then upload it again and gets hundreds of thousands of views.

I fear putting the comments section behind barriers of entry that require you to already love and support CGP Grey (or at least care about enough to click onto a subreddit) is going to come at the huge cost of creating artificial environments where you will no longer recieve feedback from more "casual viewers" or "people who dislike your content but have something productive to say about it." To me this is ripe grounds for creating an echo chamber of false positivity- fundamentally altering the function of the comments section as a whole and isn't worth it just to get rid of scambots or sexbots. Also the way you frame this pivot in your Patreon post focuses more on gaining more monetary support as the primary goal with the sexbot/chatbot deterrent almost as secondary. But it is the opposite for the Youtube video itself. I understand and would be happy to support your videos as you are one of my favorite Youtubers, but not empasizing the obvious monetary gains and even framing it as, "a better way to get rid of sexbots and chatbots" (especially given my critisms with the experiment) feels irresponsible at best and fraudulant at worst.

I love that you are doing this. Thank you! I will try to comment and engage on every video you make from now on, to help with that "engagement" score YouTube likes so much.

But how will I find out if there’s hot singles in my area now 😭

I don't like this grey.....

This is going to be an interesting experiment indeed. 🐝 I wish YouTube weren't such a seemingly effective target for scammers.

Sounds like a lot of work. Hope to see it work out.

been a fan of yours for a long time and am happy to see every one of your uploads

I thought that as someone who is both a Patreon member and someone who doesn't use Reddit, I should provide a voice of dissent. Grey is more qualified than I to speak to the business ramifications. I speak to the unfair effects for freezing out on the actual medium anyone who can't pay for the membership. I'd much rather we had an experiment where bonnie bees were urged to aggressively report the spam comments, rather than ignore them. I would also rather deal with any leftover spam than freeze out such a huge fraction of our membership. To me, such a significant difference between the have-bees and have-not-bees, is counter to the ethics of Grey's community.

Happy to support your efforts! Only recently found you but your Tiffany pain struck me.

Idk man I've seen the comments on much more viral video channels and the bots aren't that bad. Maybe it's noticeable on the creator end, but I hardly see anything. Limiting comments to just "Bonnie Bees" sounds like a bad idea and would come across as grifting money from people for a problem that doesn't really exist.

See, here's the thing with Youtube Shorts. Youtube is scared of TikTok, so they're pushing the shorts. What they should be is REJOICING in TikTok, because ... when someone leaves Youtube for TikTok, the quality of both platforms increases.

Kinda sucks that YouTube forces creator to limit people from commenting, thus hurting both the creator and they community :_Think::_Coffee:

I can't believe YouTube doesn't have an option for that.