Sfdebris.net

Just thought experiment time. It's well known that Youtube comment sections are where rational thought goes to die, between nonsensical posts and internet drama. Moderating comments is largely left up to the channel owners decisions, which can have mixed results. Content creators now have greater ease in establishing different places to allow fans to interact (i.e. Reddit and Discord).

Basically, what I'm asking is, if Youtube removed its comment sections (for some reason or another), would anything of value be lost?

It would do nothing.

At best, the comment section could be used a psychological reinforcement of something that other people share with you. Politics, sports, religion etc.

Depending on the subject matter, you could have rational discussions on things.

Only thing that it would effect would be interaction that only YT algorithm cares about.

Right, I think the value lost would just be what fun and entertainment you have with it. Obviously general fun in comments sections are overrepresented by the likes of trolls but I don't know what else you're to expect as a commentator.

It would be less enjoyable. Besides the trolls there are often very funny and insightful comments that are left by people.
I doubt it would affect Youtube's bottom line though.

I think there would be riots over it. Sadly, maybe another shooting at YouTube HQ... you can't see any more after 10,000 comments anyway. For the really big YouTube videos, like the most viewed one on the planet, that's not an issue, since it has 3,000,000 comments.

lol if they removed them where would I go to see people whining about current doctor who?

Ever since they ripped out the G+ integration it's been a mess. It was unusable before G+, and for that short, wonderful time, you could finally post long comments, fully-sourced and referenced, with proper formatting.

Now, those things aren't accessible anywhere but on the video, the notifications don't work, and if you post references to support your fact-checking it often goes into a moderation queue where no one will ever see it because content creators never check it. Meanwhile people who post short, pithy, factually-incorrect comments rise to the top of the video's popularity list because it incites argument and engagement is the only metric of success on YouTube.

First thought: Hooray!

Second thought: But now where will all the low-effort memes be aggregated? Reddit alone?

People would move their discussions to a forum where rationality and cool heads prevail. Maybe Twitter.