Friday, November 1, 2019

There's a reason people regularly tell you not to read the youtube comments!!

   I get it.. you're alone on your phone so many hours a day reading and watching mindless shit, that you begin to crave attention; you want to feel less alone after a long purge of this deep spiral.. you want affirmation!! You need community! Likes!? (sad)

For many, that means taking to the cringy comments section for social interaction.

   It's important to remember that he comment section in most online spaces tends to attract a larger percentage of (single/lonely/often bitter/cis-men/socially-isolated) folks statistically, who spread their (often critical, misogynistic, and/or hate-based) opinions and worldview based on that isolation.
   Comment spaces are in no way a reflection of greater societal opinions!! This is critical to understand... (unless your sample gets so large that it truly begins to imitate your population.)

   People who are generally happy with things/films/people/etc.. don't tend to regularly haunt the comment section alone on their computers and critique it; they're more likely to be offline/out living their lives in social situations and learning/interacting instead from their peers.
   Any intro statistics course/book will drill this concept into you endlessly; to get an unbiased statistic (meaning something you want to know about a particular population) you need to use a random sampling method from your chosen population, or sample nearly all of that population anyway.
 My most recent encountered example inspiring this post was from youtube comments (typical!)... particularly from all the people who had (assumedly) watched either the Season 1 trailer on youtube or some amount of the series "Easy" on netflix. (A friend recommended... haven't watched it yet)

----> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzRjfA_9Akw

  The first ten or twelve comments I encountered were exceptionally critical, and I wondered why that might be; is the show really that awful (it certainly could be!), or is bias sneaking in? (Particularly noting that the show is about love/relationships/sex, etc..) What do all the women think? Happy people think? (I see so few of them represented overtly in the comments section generally)
   We know that netflix removed ratings years ago for at least *some* similar reasons.. namely negativity bias, but also to get increased viewership of course! (Something prime video ever-so-painfully clings to for ethics reasons probably.... I respect it, however flawed and unhelpful)
   ...But long story short.. we rely on youtube comments/ratings now. Interestingly, the general upvote didn't match the first ten comments at all.. it had a whopping 3.2k up-votes/500 down. Why? Maybe satisfied people are good enough with a simple one-click thumbs up?
   In stats you also need to use a large pool of samples to get a good result; the bigger the pool, the more accurate your statistic is. Bias can show up in countless ways; particularly in an online space like this. It seems that sometimes the loudest/angriest few tend to drown out the complacent larger crowd overall. (I think immediately to extremist movements)
     We refer to user-generated comment spaces in statistical terms as "self-selection bias" (certain folks feel more compelled to comment than others) and in concert as "non-response bias" (of course, not everyone who watches the video also comments). As a result, we see themes like negativity bias arise; (ie: those that hated the show the most feel most strongly; and are more likely to comment!) :)
   We gotta give Netflix at least some credit.. but youtube algorithms could use some major work too!! Until we find a better way of polling/sorting commentary online, never feel bad if you want to just skip the damn comments altogether; they're a great research tool, but so often weaponized!

...butt-hurt is real... but so is a broken system, combative partisan politics and income inequality. If you ask me, we need more love, respect and understanding in online spaces. <3 p="">   

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