It is incomprehensible how it works.

If there's anything remotely offensive, that's understandable, that the Google advertising censorship machine would take it down. But even perfecly polite comments are taken down.

And even as a channel admin, I cannot find the comment anywhere to approve it. They seem to be actually fully removed.

Also YouTube notifies you of some comments, but randomly does not notify you of others. I've checked Held comments and "Comments that may be offensive have been hidden".

Everything is very blurred and you can't be certain of anything.

One thing YouTube seems to not like is if you comment multiple times. Even when replying to the channel admin each time. Presumably to prevent spammers from adding a lot of replies.

And once it removes one of your comments from a thread, it starts to remove every single future comment from tha thread, that seems to be deterministic.

One thing to try with known users that make good comments often is "Mark user as approved user". But that feature is very hard to find on the web UI and its usage must be minimal.

Also the "I haven't respoded" tab simply doesn't work, and leaves dozens of comments unresponded not shown.

YouTube not usable as a commenting platform. It's just a huge noisy mess. Perhaps this is a reflection of our Internet world in general.


Youtube randomly removes people s comments

ID: youtube-randomly-removes-people-s-comments