YouTube has for quite many years had some sort of AI automoderating the comment section of all videos, automatically removing content that it deems infringing or dangerous in some manner (such as containing URLs to dubious websites).
In principle that's all well and good. It avoids YouTube being flooded by spammers and scammers, which would most certainly happen if it weren't for this automoderation.
The problem is that the automoderation AI is broken, and will often remove comments that have absolutely nothing infringing about them. What's worst is that it does this completely silently, without notifying you in any way. Chances are that if you are a prolific youtube comment writer, a good chunk of your comments have been autoremoved by the AI, and you didn't even notice. (That's because when you submit the comment, it will show as if it were successfully submitted. Which it probably was. However, it will not show if it gets autoremoved a couple of seconds later, unless you reload the page, or try to edit your comment, which most people don't often do.)
What's even worse is that if you post enough comments that get autoremoved, apparently you get shadow-banned, at least for a time. When you are shadow-banned in this manner, all of your comments that you try to post get automatically removed, regardless of what those comments contain and which videos you are posting them to. And, of course, YouTube tells you nothing about this. It stays completely silent, just removing your comments in the background without notifying you about it. You might literally write two dozen comments to that many videos, and all of them are being autoremoved, and you may not even notice.
I recently posted this comment to a recent video that talked about the Unity game engine:
On a slightly different note, even though Unity and Unreal Engine are extremely similar in features and scope, and both can largely be used for the same things, Unity has always had this reputation of being an engine mostly associated with smaller indie games as well as more questionable games, while Unreal Engine has got more of a reputation of being associated mostly with big serious triple-A titles. This is so even though the actual numbers don't back that up. Do you know why that is?
It's mostly because the two companies went into the opposite directions with showing their splash screen when launching a game.
You see, Unity demands all games to show their splash screen when launching the game, with the game developers having a choice to opt-out of it by paying extra. They most probably thought this would be good free advertisement.
In contrast, Unreal Engine went the exact opposite route: You are, in fact, not allowed to show the Unreal Engine splash screen unless you meet certain requirements. If you don't meet the requirements it's outright against their usage license and terms of service to show their splash screen.
This has caused the unintended consequence that all cheap indie games and dubious games will show the Unity splash screen (because the devs literally can't turn it off), while the big triple-A titles will usually not, because they can afford to have it turned off. In contrast, with Unreal Engine it's the exact opposite: Cheap indie games do not show the UE splash screen (again, because they can't turn it on), while many big-budget triple-A games do.
Over the years and decades this has formed the association of "Unity" equals "cheap small-time indie game" and "Unreal Engine" equals "big-budget triple-A game".
Unreal Engine definitely made the better choice.
It got autoremoved within seconds (which I noticed when I tried to edit it). What is infringing about this comment? What triggered the AI to autoremove it? Your guess is as good as mine, because I have no idea. (And no, it's not about the length of the comment. I have in the past posted even longer comments just fine. They are still up.)
I tried rewording the comment and posting again. It got immediately autoremoved. I tried posting a completely different very short comment about how interesting the video was, and that comment was allowed to stay. Even after many minutes it was still there. I tried posting a third-time reworded version of the above comment, and it was removed.
As a test, I went to another video by a different author talking about the same topic, and posted that comment. It got autoremoved. Then I tried to once again post a very short comment about how interesting the video was and... it got autoremoved. I went to several completely different unrelated videos and posted short comments, and no matter what I wrote, even if it was just "yeah", it was autoremoved. Every single comment I made, no matter what it contained and which video it was posted to, was being autoremoved.
In other words, at the moment of writing this I have been shadow-banned in YouTube from writing any comments whatsoever. I have no idea how long this will last. Hopefully not forever. (My guess is that 24 hours, but we'll see.)
And at no point have I received any notification, any message, any email, anything, indicating that this is the situation, or what the infringing content was. It's completely silent, done in the background.
And this is, by far, not the first time this has happened. My comments being autoremoved even though they contain absolutely nothing infringing has happened probably a hundred times, if not even more.
It's quite clear that the YouTube comment automoderation logic is completely broken. It has a really high false positive ratio. Really, really high. Not only in the amount of false positives, but also what it considers a positive (ie. it does not issue false positives only on comments that might look infringing. It sometimes does it to completely innocent comments that contain absolutely nothing even remotely infringing, no matter how you interpret or read them.)
This is extremely frustrating because it just stifles conversations and discussions. Interesting comments that could spark interesting conversations are being removed left and right, all the time. It's almost impossible to have a productive conversation when one's comments are being automatically removed (yes, I have had it happen even in the middle of comment threads: Some comment of mine, written in response to someone else's comment, may be autoremoved completely at random even though, once again, it contains literally zero infringing content.)
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