I have come to a decision. YouTube could be a great community—it has a ton of content, which is both good and bad.
Good because you can literally find anything on it.
Bad because there’s so much stuff, you literally can’t find anything on it.
OK, so I exaggerated a bit there on that last one. It’s actually reasonably easy to find stuff that has a billion likes or that the algorithm thinks you should like.
I’ve noticed over the years, though, that when I comment on something, about 99 percent of my comments vanish without a trace.
They’ll show up fine as long as the page isn’t closed, but as soon as I come back, the comment is gone. Vanished. No explanation—just gone.
Now, if I were the trolling type or posted a lot of negative content, I could understand this. But I don’t.
If I don’t like a video, I just stop watching it. I don’t feel the need to berate the author or post negativity, and I try my best to never troll.
Apparently, my comments just vanish due to shadow deletion—maybe because I used the wrong phrasing, or linked to something the author or others might find interesting.
Simply deleting comments just because they contain “http” or even something as ridiculous as “site name dot extension,” all written out, can trigger this.
So, I’ve decided: I’m no longer participating.
Sure, I’ll still watch videos using something like pipe-viewer, which I’m sure they hate—but you know what? To hell with them.
I might even post a video if I want a ton of people to see it. Of course, I’m not an “influencer,” so my videos get buried under the money-makers and probably seen by almost no one.
But what I won’t do is subscribe, like, or engage with videos in any way.
If I’m not allowed to comment, why should I help a megacorp with an unreasoning hatred of good comments?
So: no likes, no subscriptions, no using players that show ads.
In short: screw you and your algorithm. No money earned from me.
I know this might seem like a bad outlook for creators who just want people to watch their videos and maybe make a few cents off my ad views.
There’s a solution though: use PeerTube with one of the monetization plugins.
So, I don’t feel too bad about it.
Yeah. That’s it. I’m done!