An Experiment With YouTube Comments…

[AustiPriest]

I wonder if this will hurt "engagement" metrics with YouTube, since commenting is one of the ways creators usually drive engagement and get their videos in more of the suggested feeds

[aykanyavas]

YouTube needs to give us a way to disable shorts. I don’t want to see them, but they always end up taking away hours of my time.

[astropgn]

This is absurd. I am not a bot, yet I am treated as a spammer because, apparently, the Elon Musk school of giving useless blue badges is a thing now. Heck, I bought that themed journal thinking it was the best way to support a creator while receiving something more than useless digital perks on YouTube. Now, I am treated as if I am the scum of YouTube, unable to express myself in a video because I am too poor to afford a monthly premium subscription. We can comment on every other channel, but why is this one special? Is this channel that rare mythical golden rosemary that needs gentle handling? Also, any premium who disagree with this comment will have the advantage of being able to talk all they want, while I will be censored and unable to reply to my own comment. This is horrible; only mean people do things like this.

[Regendur]

I love being part of exclusive content.

[rearles]

For years I’ve been a student and thus banned from becoming a Bonnie Bee. I’m finally in a financially stable place outside of school and so I’m so happy to be a Bonnie Bee.

[TheRealzPope]

Grey, your alliteration, simplistic yet classy animation, and silky smooth voice make this channel a highlight of my life. I’m currently taking a guided tour of Europe, and our bus broke down yesterday on the way from Wales to Scotland. We were stuck on the side of the road for around three hours. I sat down, put my air pods in, and I watched three or four of your videos that I’d seen already in the past, and the time FLEW by. I forgot that I was even cold. Thank you so much for the amount of effort that you put into getting accurate, and understandable information out into the world.

[XadackaPhotography]

Blue ticks are out, being allowed to comment on CGP Grey videos is in as the internets new status symbol

[eddymqu]

It’s weird that a company that can be so good at blocking email spam be so bad at comment spam.

[michellehao]

I fear putting the comments section behind barriers of entry that require you to already love and support CGP Grey (or at least care about enough to click onto a subreddit) is going to come at the huge cost of creating artificial environments where you will no longer recieve feedback from more "casual viewers" or "people who dislike your content but have something productive to say about it." To me this is ripe grounds for creating an echo chamber of false positivity- fundamentally altering the function of the comments section as a whole and isn't worth it just to get rid of scambots or sexbots.

Also the way you frame this pivot in your Patreon post focuses more on gaining more monetary support as the primary goal with the sexbot/chatbot deterrent almost as secondary. But it is the opposite for the Youtube video itself. I understand and would be happy to support your videos as you are one of my favorite Youtubers, but not empasizing the obvious monetary gains and even framing it as, "a better way to get rid of sexbots and chatbots" (especially given my critisms with the experiment) feels irresponsible at best and fraudulant at worst.

[gnarled]

God, I hate those bots. So glad you’re doing something about it!

[beebee]

Feels awkward since my username was already “bee” before this, but this finally encouraged me to join. What Grey said about YouTube favoring shorts at the cost of long-term videos really hit home with me. I guess YouTube was trying to rival tiktok with their mindset behind as they offered up to a 10, 000 dollar bonus depending on how well it did. As such, minimal effort, low quality content that can be pushed easily for views gets shown to viewers. Meanwhile, high quality, high effort content often suffers at the cost of it and hardly sees anywhere near as much SEO. It’s frustrating, but it’s the nature of things I suppose. Still, it’s amusing to me how I’ve seen certain content creators upload a short, wait a couple months, then upload it again and gets hundreds of thousands of views.

[Jinsoku]

YouTube Comments are perfectly balanced with no exploits

[JohnHudert]

Here’s for a coffee (or tea or beer) for you or the crew while they add Bonnie Bees 😎

[ripbobsaget]

But how will I find out if there’s hot singles in my area now 😭

[datininho]

I recently signed up and I wanted to thank the adless videos, it is so refreshing having informative content without any pauses for raycon or something like that. And I want to support this format for as long as I can!

[tehcrashxor]

Sounds like a lot of work. Hope to see it work out.

[michellehao]

Just checking if I can still comment after my patreon expired

[joshpearson]

Idk man I've seen the comments on much more viral video channels and the bots aren't that bad. Maybe it's noticeable on the creator end, but I hardly see anything. Limiting comments to just "Bonnie Bees" sounds like a bad idea and would come across as grifting money from people for a problem that doesn't really exist.

Edit: Look at me being completely right

[Rattiar]

I love that you are doing this. Thank you! I will try to comment and engage on every video you make from now on, to help with that "engagement" score YouTube likes so much.

[RoronoaZoroSensei]

Oh man I totally get the point of this.
But it does feel a bit bad, like "banning the poor from conversation", "inhibiting free spech" yada yada
If the real conversation is happening on reddit anyways, why not lock the comments here completely?
I dunno
I hope it works out, or rather, I hope youtube fucking fixes their own problem