A few days ago I was watching a video on YouTube about the longest proof humanity has ever achieved in mathematics, being over a terabyte in size of raw text and data. Every once in awhile I like to read comments to videos, so I scrolled down to someone commenting about how long proofs are terrifying to them because there's a potential that there are things that are true that we could never possibly understand or comprehend as humans. I think this is a fair but misguided point, so I replied to the comment stating that actually, mathematics is in some sense entirely futile because we have to assume some things to even start with the math (axioms) which we cannot prove without assuming other axioms which we cannot prove without assuming... and so on. There's also a theorem by Godel that states that mathematics can never be complete, in that no matter what axiom system you use that doesn't assume an infinite number of things, you cannot prove everything possible in mathematics. So, it's better to think of math instead of striving to prove everything or understand everything, as trying to prove every theorem at least twice, with two different axiom systems. So, if one axiom system is found to have problems (leads to a contradiction), the theorem would still be true in the other axiom system. So, instead of quantity or length, we're looking for soundness; that the theorems we have are actually probably true regardless of what we assumed to get there.
Or at least, that's what I tried to reply to this comment. YouTube has one of the most antisocial and dangerous features I've ever seen on a social media platform, and that is its Top Comment setting for the comments. By default, when you make a YouTube video, the comments section is set to display under "Top Comment" instead of "Newest First". The idea, theoretically, you should still have all the same comments, it's just that the Top Comment option sorts them by number of likes or engagement, and Newest First orders them in the order they were posted.
Now I've always selected the Newest First option when uploading videos on YouTube, even though I've almost never seen anybody else do so. Why? A few reasons. I don't think just because something has a lot of likes that it is necessarily the best comment; it just means the most people saw it and interacted with it (I like to dub this the "Reddit fallacy"). Also, the Newest First option reminds me of the golden age of YouTube when you would see a live feed of people's reactions to a video in the comments; it was a lot more liquid and less static (top comments tend to be top comments forever once they're on the top). But most importantly, Newest First doesn't delete comments from the comments section!
Top Comments does not just sort the comments in the comments section of a video: it actually will hide comments and replies, making them impossible to even find or see. You can write a comment on a video with Top Comments enabled and it's possible nobody would be able to see the comment whatsoever. I'm not just saying that it'll be at the bottom of the stream of comments; I mean if you were to sit there, loading more and more comments in the comments section until you got all the way to the bottom, your comment may not show up at all. Even more freaky is that the comment does exist, it's not actually shadowbanned; if this happens, if you switch the view of the comments section to Newest First yourself, then you can find the comment. And this is exactly what happened with my thoughtful reply about mathematics that I started this page talking about. So, what is going on here?
To me, this doesn't make any sense. The Top Comment idea is already damaging because you only get a select few comments that actually break out and get loaded for everybody, and very few other comments will get any traction because they're buried under the ones that already have a lot of likes. To then further hide comments that people just posted, making it impossible for others to even see it, how is the top comments under the video ever supposed to change? And furthermore, what algorithm or AI is there behind the scenes which is deciding what comments are made visible or not, when this is happening immediately after the posting of the comment? How is it okay to trust an AI to sort comments like this on Top Comment enabled videos (read: nearly every video on the platform) before anybody even gets to look at it? In my particular case, my reply to the comment is hidden, but other replies before and after my reply are not. All those other replies have likes, their own replies, etc., and then there's my reply with no engagement, no likes, no dislikes, nothing. Nobody even sees it. If you're going to do such a thing, please at least tell me why my comment is hidden so I can figure out how to avoid it next time. I'm absolutely certain they'll never do that though because the reason would probably be "your comment is two paragraphs and full of academic words," or "it's new," or some other horrible reason in Google's AI which would immediately fall apart under scrutiny.
What mostly concerns me about this is that I have seen literally nobody ever bring this up. It's like the text censoring thing from a couple years ago. Is this only happening to me? Or does nobody take the time to look and see that their comment is missing? I like to come back to comments occasionally to write new replies to people and defend my point or praise other people who make good points, so I notice this a lot, but I guess other people don't do this? It's really confusing and stupid.
There's other weird behavior on YouTube that makes me feel uncomfortable about the whole site. One of them, which I planned to make a video or page about but didn't end up doing so, is that only certain videos will have autoplaying thumbnails and others wont. Doesn't have to do with video length or anything. Often I'll watch an entire video in the autoplay feature with the subtitles without actually clicking on to the video, and I think the evil AI of YouTube hates me for doing that and will make certain videos which it thinks I'm more likely to watch not have autoplaying thumbnails. I don't like this behavior because these things along with the algorithm that decides on the homepage what I want and don't want to watch, I feel like the site is manipulating me to do what it wants me to do, guiding me to watch the videos that YouTube wants me to watch and hiding videos and comments that it doesn't want me or others to see. That's why I recommend using something like RSS to view videos on YouTube instead of using their Orwellian site directly.
October 23, 2024