patrick.net

One thing I've really noticed lately on youtube is the bot presence. I'm not certain of the motives, but it feels like I see at least two very common trends when it comes to very popular youtube pages, like for popular songs, or songs for popular artists.

- recycled comments like "this song just hits different", "this is a total masterpiece", "popular opinion: XYZ", etc... there's lots of variations, but these trite comments seem to get lots of upvotes, and so they get posted on tons of videos. I suspect the purpose is to give the account some kinda reputation which will then get cashed in some other way on a later date.

- mood or opinion setting and influencing. I think people, especially younger crowds, are wired to adopt an opinion compatible with the crowd, and bots take advantage of this by setting the mood and by asserting opinions on discussion topics / pages / videos etc... I seem to notice that when a new anticipated song/video is published, I think there's companies that deploy bots to flood the comments with opinions, helping to establish the mood early so that human posters will be influenced by reading the comments, and thus making their own comments more compatible with what the bot team wanted.

I mean, we know the twitter / fakebook et. al. have huge bot armies spreading propaganda too, so this isnt surprising at all. I just wanted to share my observation.