Me and user engagement

Well, yes.

So my attempt to put out a niche video nobody in their right mind could possibly care about resulted in the most successful first three days of anything I've ever put on the channel, and while the trend is looking like it'll end up below the Chris Sawyer's Locomotion video over the long term those are still some numbers.

That kind of viewership brings with it something else, which is comments.

I have an uneasy relationship with comments which I'm not sure is actually justified given the reality. So with that volume over such a short space of time I thought it would be interesting to dig in to what I actually see.

Positivity.

First off, the vast majority of comments have been positive. Of that 227 comments only 18 are my own replies because I'm rubbish at going in and responding to things once it's more than a trickle. Not shown are 8 or 9 I deleted for various reasons, and one instant hide-user-from-channel. That latter category tends to increase a bit after the first day or so as YouTube casts its audience net wider and brings in people less aligned to what I'm trying to do, then settles down as we get into the long tail of people finding the videos through search and recommendation, so just under 5% "bad" is probably representative.

8 or 9 isn't really enough to infer trends from so I'm going to draw from wider experience with the channel as a whole for this, but my usual reasons for deleting something are:

1. Condescending but not overly aggressive.
2. Responding to the thumbnail without watching the video.
3. Heading toward picking fights with other commenters

Hide-from-channels are rarer - currently there have only been 11 over the entire history of the channel, or at least 11 whose accounts were not later terminated by YouTube for other reasons.

Of those I'd say (finger in air estimates here) about 50% is manosphere shit on the Duke Nukem 3D video, then the rest divides roughly evenly between being aggressively condescending, insulting other commenters, spam/gibberish, and people so misaligned with what I'm doing and so angry about it that I have no clue why they're even being served the video.

I headed this section "positivity" but now I've been distracted I reckon 2 out of those 3 above are interesting enough to dive further into. (Picking fights on the Internet has been around since the days of Usenet so I think everything that could be written on the pyschology of that already has been).

I think the problem is you don't really know how to write section headings.

There's a bizarre phenomenon when you display a skill on the Internet. A small but persistent group of people seek to "one-up" you by diminishing what you've done. The hardware repair channels get this way worse than I do; a constant wave of "you may have made it work but your poor soldering has ruined the appearance of that board", "this repair is only really impressive to someone who doesn't understand how to investigate problems as you wasted so much time in the diagnostic stage checking things which didn't need checked", "this is worthless trash not even worth trying to repair", and so on.

The psychology of why this happens is about as fascinating as it's hard to find useful research on, but common threads seem to be a misguided perception of displaying skill being a play for social dominance and thus a threat needing to be countered, disindividuation arising from feelings you need to "defend" a particular way of doing things, and a lack of social consequence - it's rare for people to remember usernames from one YouTube comments section to another, whereas on a small forum or community you would quickly become "that guy who always has to nitpick everything".

I do control for this by being trying as much as I can to put in an upfront, "I am not smart, I am not good at this, I do not know what I am doing". I know this is not entirely true (and one commenter did call me out for knowing more than I claim to!) but it really defangs the outlook that I must doing this as some kind of dominance play, and also the perceived value of any smarter-than-you responses. Well done, you showed off you were smarter than the guy who just said he wasn't very smart - what are you going to do next, enter a weight-lifting contest against a chihuahua?

This is also why I tend to be strict on deletion. Firstly as a form of feedback ("hide user from channel" is a shadowban, but regular deletion is visible if a user cares to check), but also as social proof. When people see that everything written below the line is a polite and worthwhile contribution, they get that this is "the vibe" and I reckon that's another reason it's rare for me to get poor-quality comments in the long tail of a video. Early curation helps long-term results.

Your title enrages me, sir!

Now on to something far more bizarre than just a big bundle of complex psychology. I've noticed over the past few months an increase in people commenting purely based on the thumbnail and title without watching the video.

This is very obvious in the case of the latest video where you don't get too far into the video before it's clear the question is being posed as a strawman to get to the actually interesting bit: investigating why some old code of mine which tried to do something ambitious is slow. (And similar with the Locomotion video, which uses the premise that the wider industry thought it was mediocre-at-best to explore my own feelings about it).

This does not stop people from going "bruh it literally came with games, haven't you heard of Nibbles and Gorillas?"

I find there's two separate topics which fascinate me here, but if I go into the "if I don't mention something, it's not necessarily because I don't know about it" aspect and why all videos are not 3 day long enumerations of all information a person knows I'll be here all day and besides, Technology Connections has spent many frustrated BlueSky posts pondering that phenomenon.

No, it's the fundamental misapprehension of what the purpose of YouTube as a platform is. Namely for viewers to watch (and hopefully be entertained by) videos, while in return either watching advertisements or paying a monthly fee. As part of this a comments facility is provided for various purposes including clarifying questions, further engagement with the content in question or simply saying some nice words about how you found this entertaining.

It is not, as far as I can tell, to be presented with a screen of thumbnails and short titles, each of which you are expected to answer as if any implied questions or comments have been directed at you. There is no affordance in the user interface which suggests this is the case.

Again, the psychology is fascinating and more than I can cover here. A fair chunk of it comes from an increasing awareness of how "clickbait" works - and I wouldn't call how I package my videos "clickbait" but it does play into that same curiosity gap and so people react to that by taking a definite action; by going to my video and saying what amounts to, "I don't need to watch this, I already know the answer. Your attempt at grabbing my attention failed, you wily trickster you."

I do find it interesting that as someone who A/B tests alternate thumbnails and titles wherever possible, the majority of these comments tend to correspond to whichever combination is winning in the watch time stakes. Which suggests if you're making solid, attention-grabbing thumbnails then you're always going to get some of these until people figure out better ways of managing the curiosity gap.

Positivity. For real this time, honest.

That's the 10 dealt with. Let's get to the other 209.

The pleasant surprise is people overwhelmingly got what I was trying to do here, which is that it's not about the question or the answer but the journey between those two points. This is why I disliked the editing because I don't think it's clear enough that this was me discovering this world of programming the EGA for the first time and understanding on a new level how much optimisation and programming trickery had gone into those games I used to play. People still got it, but it could have been clearer.

Anyway, I promised positivity so if we look at the themes they break down into three main areas:

1. Shared nostalgia - the people who'd been in similar programming clubs, or had their first programming experiences in some dialect of BASIC, or even grown up with that sort of janky amateur-programmed game. I love this, it's one of the best things about running the channel that you get to hear all of these memories.
2. Sympathy for the challenge - I always feel nervous going into any of these deep dives as I really don't know this stuff, I have no grounds to be an authority on it and I'm figuring it all out as I go along. Having people go "this is difficult stuff, you did a great job with it" is a warming thing to read. Especially when some of them worked on this sort of thing commercially in the day.
3. Suggestions for improvements - I deliberately asked for this type of feedback, but I was surprised by the form it took. Mentions of adaptive tile refresh and going into assembler for the performance-critical bits I was expecting, but not the desire for people to see me improve the original BASIC version further. Plenty of suggestions for alternative BASIC compilers, using CALL ABSOLUTE or faster screen modes... it seems there's a real appetite for making the original faster. This is something I may have to address.

I credit some of this to having built up a world in which I cover things with a level of warmth and even-handedness, mainly because several commenters called that out specifically. A big part of finding my own voice has been the realisation that the middle ground between po-faced "retro is important and everything must be equally revered" and brattish "everything should be clowned on for maximum entertainment" does not necessarily have to be dry, factual and neutral.

A theme I regularly come back to is the three-way conflict between how something was viewed at the time, how it is viewed now, and my own personal reaction to it. When I look at my own reaction, I aim to ask... why? In the case of Locomotion that was my affection for a game being the last of its kind, and in the case of QBASIC it's about facing my own shortcomings as a programmer. Since most people aren't particularly precious in my reaction to something, there's a lot of opportunity there to treat it as a source of amusement.

(I say most, because inevitably there will be someone enraged that 1990s and early 2000s me did not come to exactly the same conclusion they hold in 2026).

I think that naturally leads into exploring things in an even-handed way, because in order to understand one's reaction to something you have to look at the context surrounding it. RoseTintedSpectrum does this well in his game reviews, because he's contrasting his modern-day frustration against the experiences of being young and only having £2.99 to spend on a game for the next fortnight. In his TV commentary, a lot of the comedy is in his own stubbornheaded refusal to apply the MST3K mantra and just accept standard conventions of narrative convenience. Don't tell him I said that.

I'm drifting off topic here so to bring it back, I think this is reflected in how people approach comments. By defusing any perceived need to "defend" something you give people space to explore what you're saying about it and engage on kinder terms.

I mean, it's still not going to stop me opening the comments to review with anything other than a dread-laden sense of "what awful thing is going to be waiting in there for me today", but I think at this point it's obvious that's a me problem and perhaps it's time to accept being an eternal pessimist.