The quality of the comments reflects the quality of the content. Insightful and thoughtful videos tend to have insightful and thoughtful comments. Low brow videos have low brow comments. Ragebait videos have rageful comments.
If all you see is shitty comments, I'm afraid that says a lot about what you watch.
The insightful videos I see mostly have comments like "thanks xxx this video was super helpful". Which I guess is nice and polite and models good behavior. But it also doesn't add much value for me.
Eh, insightful and thoughtful videos tend to have better comments than the low brow videos, but they're still not useful. The best of them read like a decent-but-not-great subreddit's comment thread.
Taking one example, 3Blue1Brown's Deep Learning series, episode 6. Here are the top few comments [0]:
> I'm a university lecturer with a PhD in AI, and I cannot compete with the quality of this work. Videos like this put the entire higher education system to shame. Fantastic!
This is a nice comment, but doesn't contribute anything to my day. I'm sure the creator is glad to see it and I'm glad someone said it, but I don't need to read it.
> Are you kidding me? ONE WEEK FOR 2 MASTERPIECES?!
> Thank you so much!
Same story.
> I've got to say - "Attention Is All You Need" is an incredible title for a research paper.
And now we're down to the reddit comments.
> As a graduating PhD student working in Natural Language Processing, I still found that video to be extremely beneficial. Awesome!
Nice.
> 3b1b is the only content producer whose videos I start by first making coffee, then upvoting, then hitting the play button.
Nice.
> Attention existed before the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need".
> The main contribution was that attention was... all you needed for sequence processing (you didn't need recurrence). Self-attention specifically was novel though.
Finally a comment that contributed something. Not much, mind you (the video doesn't actually claim otherwise), but something.
Unfortunately, that's it. I kept scrolling for a while longer through pages and pages of thank-yous. And that's typically my experience with comments on thoughtful videos. It's not usually like the HN comments where you can actually get a lot of value from the comments alone, they're just... shallow. Sometimes nice shallow, but still shallow.
If all you see is shitty comments, I'm afraid that says a lot about what you watch.