I’m having my comments I made the past few days receive zero engagements. It’s not just me losing the early bird lottery too; my replies to a highly engaged comment has zero likes, while several comments immediately after me has double digits. It’s nothing incendiary at all, just normal people’s comments. But something just tripped the enigmatic AI and thenceforth I’m shadow banned.

Why you should know this?

Because YouTube is being a thought police between creators and their communities. It feels to me like 99.999% of creators on YouTube have no idea that this is happening, that honest to goodness people’s engagements are never going to reach them on the platform; they’re being silently silenced, by an AI that is figuratively a black box.

Look at this screenshot. If that’s not damning evidence you tell me what is.

Imgur

The comment is straight up gone when viewing with a logged out tab. I’m definitely 100% shadow banned right now.

    • IWantToFuckSpez
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      611 months ago

      Yeah I’ve blocked the comments section with uBlock. Most of the time it’s just garbage in there.

    • @ruk_n_rulOP
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      -111 months ago

      I take supporting creators with engagements seriously.

      • @Pratai@lemmy.ca
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        211 months ago

        You realize that commenting on lemmy isn’t the same the as commenting on YouTube, right?

          • @Pratai@lemmy.ca
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            111 months ago

            How is lemmy different from YouTube? Seriously? If you can’t tell the difference, there’s no way I can help you.

            • phillaholic
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              -211 months ago

              That’s not an answer.

              The whole point of lemmy is to be decentralized and made up of different instances with different rules. You are a lemmy.ca user talking to a lemm.we used on a lemmy.world topic. Some instances are fully of toxic shit, some aren’t. If you’re calling YouTube comments garbage, there’s garbage to be had in the fediverse too. Acting like someone’s dumb for caring about YouTube comments while posting on lemmy is also dumb. Let people care about what they want to care about.

              • @Pratai@lemmy.ca
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                111 months ago

                YouTube grifts its content creators. Lemmy does not. Commenting on YouTube videos support YOUTUBE- Not the content creators.

  • Hyperreality
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    411 months ago

    More generally, it’s an important reminder for content creators that their entire youtube career is built on quick sand.

    You can be earning a decent living one day, the next day youtube can block your account or remove monetisation for no valid reason, and you’re shit out of luck.

    I mean, if you’re making a lot of money on youtube, power to you. But you should be saving as much as possible for that day and have a back-up plan. It may never come, it may come tomorrow.

    I cringed when one creator mentioned giving up on her degree to focus on youtube. I mean, sure she’s making bank right now. But who knows how long that’ll last.

  • Sagrotan
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    19 months ago

    IMO at least the educational content of YouTube shouldn’t be in private have entirely, too important today.

  • @ruk_n_rulOP
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    -111 months ago

    This is coming out of my orifice but I think this also affects creators in that once people like myself know we’re shadow banned we will not be posting comments because, you know, what’s the point? And that is a deduction in engagement, and reductions in engagement affects the creators in visibility in equally vague ways (because opaque black box ML-AIs are driving both of these actions).