So that's why every comment has seemingly become a variation of "Can we all just appreciate the effort that X puts into their videos"? I guess it is better than flame wars but that's a low bar. These comments are just as uninteresting to read as the flame wars they replaced.
It is better than flame wars, so unless you have a suggestion, I don’t know what else they could do.
But I disagree with your premise. I know several YouTubers with reasonably large communities that have incredibly fun and wholesome interactions in the comments, mainly made possible by this sentiment analysis. Negativity and positivity both have feedback loops. If you display negativity, people will be more negative; if you display positivity, people will be more positive.
They could remove the comment section entirely. They've had some version of a comment section for almost two decades now and at no point during that time have they succeeded at cultivating a platform wide culture for interesting comments.
Flame wars were obviously bad and negative. Generic positive comments are slightly better but they still do not say anything interesting related to the content of the video.
At this point, comments could just as well exist out-of-band on other platforms that have figured out how to foster discussions better (hint: extensive manual moderation is required, which Google will never provide).
> They've had some version of a comment section for almost two decades now and at no point during that time have they succeeded at cultivating a platform wide culture for interesting comments.
I'd propose there is no need for a public comments section. I honestly don't understand this feature creep.
You can't call it feature creep if it's been there since literally day 1.
Some channels use the comment section extensively. PBS Space Time for example does a Q&A almost every episode where they answer questions posted as comments from previous videos.
Almost certainly this would negatively impact some engagement metric that is tied to someone’s sense of self worth, and this will not happen despite being clearly the best thing for the product.
