YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

In reality, if they wanted to fix comments, they could easily do it without any high-tech stuff, through basic UI redesign.

It's the quintessential broken window effect. The comment section design is horrible for actual discussions. People who have something intelligent to day simply don't bother. On the other hand, anyone who wants a place to put some hostile nonsense with high visibility gets exactly that. The behavior gets normalized and the ratio of hostile nonsense keeps itself at a high level.

I understand YT's concern. The Feds find child porn discussions on your website, they're not gonna simply ignore it, any more than they ignored "escorts" on craigslist and backpage. I get that part. But instead of going down this road where you just delete it for everyone, tell people that they are now responsible for the content on their videos. We find these child porn talks on your videos we yank your channel, and report it to the Feds. Simple as that.

I don't know? That probably has some drawbacks too, I don't know? I'm just trying to find anything that can be done to protect us, not necessarily from the douchebags, but from the worsening consequences that the douchebags seem to have on everyone else in the community.

Yes, exactly. I've never understood why content-host sites seem to think attaching first-party comment hosting directly to hosted content is a good idea.

Why not just host what you host, and then let aggregator/discussion sites (various subreddits, various private forums, Usenet, Slack/Discord groups, etc.†) link to your thing-that-you host and host comments? You can have RSS feeds to ensure those aggregator sites can—if they want—automatically generate their own link-posts when your site has a new post.

And, best of all (from my perspective, at least), it doesn't force people who are consuming your content for different reasons into the same room where they will inevitably shout over one-another due to competing access needs. Each community can have their own conversation about your content, and can feel morally justified in kicking out uncivil people, since they can just go find a different conversation about the same thing in a different community. Rather than there being one "canonical" conversation that they feel shut out of.

† I exclude Twitter from this list because Twitter has no concept of partitioned subcommunities, and so inevitably, if there's a conversation about something on Twitter, it becomes the "canonical" conversation. That's kind of the point of Twitter, for some use-cases (e.g. celebrities arguing with other celebrities where other celebrities can watch and get pulled in), but it's bad for the use-case of regular people trying to have a regular discussion.

They're not protecting anyone, they're just sweeping the problem under the carpet. The real problem is naive/ignorant/reckless parents allowing kids to upload their stuff for the world to watch.