People make claims about shills, bots, astroturfers, and so on, all the time, also on HN, and experience has taught me that nearly all of this is projection: seeing what you want to see, or fear to see, or some other pre-existing perception. Overwhelmingly, people are seeing patterns that they themselves are reading into the material. I really do mean overwhelmingly, at least in our little corner of the internet. I don't know whether it's different for YouTube comments but don't see why it wouldn't be.
Without some corroborating evidence, these claims don't hold any weight. It's not that they're necessarily wrong, it's that there's no way to tell. Imagination produces just the same perceptions, and there is a ton of imagination going around.
Occasionally we do find evidence, and then we can do something about it. Absent that, though, the default explanation has to be that you can simply see anything in anything, especially when emotions are involved. Note the "I fear" in the title of this submission.
What's frustrating is that users don't have access to most of the data, making it harder to look for evidence themselves. They have to rely on someone else to do it and then trust what they say. In a low-trust social climate, that's working less and less, which only fuels more imagination.
Without some corroborating evidence, these claims don't hold any weight. It's not that they're necessarily wrong, it's that there's no way to tell. Imagination produces just the same perceptions, and there is a ton of imagination going around.
Occasionally we do find evidence, and then we can do something about it. Absent that, though, the default explanation has to be that you can simply see anything in anything, especially when emotions are involved. Note the "I fear" in the title of this submission.
What's frustrating is that users don't have access to most of the data, making it harder to look for evidence themselves. They have to rely on someone else to do it and then trust what they say. In a low-trust social climate, that's working less and less, which only fuels more imagination.