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YouTube is hiding comments mentioning “OpenStreetMap” (vimeo.com)
85 points by petschge on Oct 21, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



I'm not going to make an account to watch this video, but YouTube comments have been broadly broken for at least a year now and I highly doubt this is a wordfilter thing. It often takes weeks for comments to display on new low-traffic videos, and sometimes they just get lost to the ether. The claimed number of comments rarely matches the number which are displayed.

On popular videos, comments with the most upvotes (often containing important info) are no longer shown at the top, even when sorting by 'top comments'. And even when they are from the uploader. YouTube uses some other esoteric criteria to decide what you should see.

What I'm trying to say is, if you're using YT comments for actual discussion or recording information then you're doing it wrong. They are there to help promote a broad feeling of engagement. It does not matter in the slightest to YT whether every visitor to the page sees the same set of comments, its irrelevant.


> They are there to help promote a broad feeling of engagement.

I guess by this point they could streamline that process (and avoid a lot of harrassment) by simply generating all comments with GPT3.


Can't replicate, I'm able to comment favourable things about OpenStreetMap[s] on random videos and have it stay up just fine.

Edit: I'd expect the video posted to back up its allegation with an example of a non-OpenStreetMap comment that wasn't hidden. Without that, I speculate that it may be some add-on that the user's installed that hides all YouTube comments, perhaps..?


Or just a bug, or an over-zealous spam filter, or any of a hundred other explanations other than "Google is actively suppressing mentions of OpenStreetMaps in youtube comments in order to maintain dominance of it's own mapping platform" based on a screen recording of one guy posting one comment.


Plot twist: the post was designed to trick people into testing the functionality and create publicity for OpenStreetMaps ;)


Each YouTube creator can create their own custom blacklist of words[1]. That might be what is going on. Or if the account leaving the comment leaves the same comment over and over and over again (or similar ones at least) that might trip the spamfilter algorithm for that account.

I tried to replicate this myself and the comment went through just fine so it does not look like OpenStreetMap is banned platform wide.

[1] Go to https://studio.youtube.com/ then click on Settings, then Community, then scroll down to "Blocked words". The help for it says "All existing and future comments containing or closely matching these words will be held for review. Live chat messages containing or closely matching these words will be blocked."


Weird. I see there are two comments on the video, but I can't see the actual comments. Sorting by top or new doesn't help.


How do we know that this only effects OpenStreetMap comments and isn't just a more general bug?

Even if it is, I'd wager it's likely just a poorly trained spam filter rather than some malicious attempt at suppression.


Maybe it is just about who is behind as a promoter/sponsor-ads on the kind of content that the video allow or meta-describe, so OpenStreetMap looks like a unfair competitor or kind of. So yeah, once again the esoteric criteria (that rozab mention)


YouTube can flag accounts for spam/promotion. My guess is there's something like that at play where anytime his comment has OpenStreetMaps in it it gets removed.


Can't watch it without login.


[flagged]


> Once again proving

I hope you get a chance to come back to this thread and have your presumptions challenged.


I do not anticipate changing my opinion that monopolies preference their own services to the detriment of market competition. Numerous court cases have born this out.


[flagged]


What are you actually trying to accomplish with comments like this?




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