I always thought those 'first comment' people on YouTube were just trying too hard, but a guy in a live stream chat told me to check the timestamps on a viral clip from last month, and he was right, they're all bots.

Honestly, I looked at a video with 200k views that went up at 3 AM, and the top five 'first' comments were posted within 2 seconds of each other, which is just not possible for real people. Has anyone else found a comment section that was totally taken over like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

adam_adams14d ago

Check the commenter's profile before you even read the text. Click the name. Bots have zero playlists, no channel, and weird auto-generated usernames. Youtube makes it super obvious once you know what to look for. I report them as spam every single time. It never seems to do anything, but I still do it. The whole thing just makes comment sections feel totally dead and fake now.

alex_johnson14d ago

Ever wonder if the bots are actually winning by making us ignore all comments now? I used to find cool small channels through replies, but now I just skip over anything that looks slightly off. It's like we're training ourselves to not even try talking to strangers online anymore. What's the point of a comment section if everyone assumes it's fake?

samjohnson6d ago

I used to just scroll past any comment with weird grammar, but last week I saw a bot copy my exact reply from three months ago. It was on a tiny guitar tutorial channel with like 200 subs. That really got me. If they're scraping old comments from real people to look real, then we really have lost. I don't even check profiles like Adam says, I just assume the whole section is poisoned now. The bots aren't just posting spam, they're making us not want to talk at all.