Earlier I wrote about how for some months now the YouTube automoderation system has been completely out of control, apparently removing something like 90% of all replies to comments, and a good portion of original comments as well. And this completely regardless of what the comments contained (or what the video was about.) It made having any kind of conversation in the comment section impossible.
And it seemed to be completely random. One particularly egregious example that I encountered was replying to someone's comment, my comment immediately disappeared, but when I edited my comment and added something to the end of it, the comment stayed. So it was not about what the comment contained (as I left that completely intact), it was completely random.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed that something suddenly changed, and comments were now staying and were not being removed. And, in fact, I noticed that many of my comments (especially replies to someone else's comments) had reappeared, after several weeks of not being visible even to me.
I initially thought that hey, nice, they fixed their broken automoderation system.
However, later the suspicion came to my mind: What if they didn't "fix" it by making the moderation rules sane again? What if they "fixed" it by implementing a "shadow banning" mechanism. In other words, perhaps your comments that were previously just removed are now only visible to you but not anybody else?
I tried to do some minor testing to find out, and what I found was stranger than that.
I had written a comment to some video that I thought might perhaps have something the automoderation could perhaps remove or shadow-ban. The video has something like 900 comments according to the number displayed at the beginning of the comment section. So I checked the video using a browser's private window (which causes me to not be logged in, and thus browsing youtube anonymously).
I scrolled through all the comments that it showed, and mine wasn't there. I checked several times, and it wasn't there. Was it indeed shadow-banned?
Then I tried to sort the comments by "newest first", and went to the time when I had posted my comment. And what do you know, it was there! For some reason it only appeared when I sorted the comments in that manner, but not by the default sorting order ("top comments").
It appears that, at a minimum, YouTube is only showing a limited number of comments when you use the default sorting (ie. "top comments"), but it does show all the most recent ones if you sort by that.
However, that's when I noticed something really strange: Someone had replied to my comment.
What's so strange about that? The fact that the reply was only visible in the private browser window, where I was not logged in. In my normal browser window, where I am logged in, that reply is in no way, shape or form visible. I never got a notification of a reply (under the bell icon on the top right), the reply doesn't show under my comment (it doesn't even show the "1 reply" text), nothing.
And it's not like this was just some kind of weird delay where someone just commented 10 seconds prior and it took a bit of time for me to get a notification. The comment was written 8 hours prior.
So this is a really weird case of someone's reply to my comment being visible to people who are not logged in to YouTube, but not to me.
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