I use YouTube quite a lot, and have done for a long time, also commenting quite a lot on content I find thought-provoking — usually lengthy, thoughtful, well-composed comments discussing the content of a video, or aiming to convey additional useful information to other viewers interested in the topic of a video.

Seemingly more and more often I am having notices pop up in the app saying that one of my comments was removed due to violating their community guidelines on "harassment and cyberbullying." I have not ever made a comment remotely engaged in harassment or cyberbullying, at least insofar as any remotely sane or reasonable definition of either of those that I can think of, and yet this happens over and over again to me — even once resulting in a 24 hour ban from leaving comments anywhere on the site. Today I just got a notice of another comment removal threatening that "if I keep leaving comments like this," I may "have [my] channel terminated."

But because YouTube's system doesn't actually tell you or show you what the offending comment is, or provide any way whatsoever to learn this as far as I can tell, nor do they provide any explanation whatsoever of how your comment violated the given policy, it's COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE for me to adjust my behavior or verbiage when commenting or know what the hell I'm not allowed to say or talk about in order to avoid violating this absurdly vague policy.

Moreover, everywhere I go on YouTube I see genuinely harassing and bullying comments by other users that never seem to flag the policy or get removed. I can't make sense of just how ubiquitous OBVIOUS unaddressed violations of this policy are all over the site, while anything I've ever said would have to be put through some seriously twisted logic to be interpreted as a violation of the policy either as written or in spirit, and yet I'm getting these notices over and over again whenever I've been active on the site. I am starting to wonder if maybe some person or group of people who doesn't like my stance or opinions on something has just started following me around the site and disingenuously mass-reporting all my comments to try to get me banned or something. Is that a common occurrence?

In any event, if there is anyone at YouTube or Google actually reading people's posts here, you guys have really got to start actually SHOWING PEOPLE THE COMMENT IN QUESTION when you're going to flag a comment for a violation — ESPECIALLY if you are going to have some kind of opaque points system that will ultimately result in their account being banned or their channel being terminated as a result of too many. This is just bare-bones, obvious, basic common sense here: If we're not given any idea WHAT comments we've made have been judged as violating a policy — only that A comment we've made has been removed for violating a policy — then you're not giving people any opportunity to change or adapt their behavior in order to conform with your policies. How does this in any way serve your goals for what you want the conversations on the site to look like, or help users know with any specificity whatsoever you're going to consider appropriate versus inappropriate I'm relation to your policy guidelines?

The only reason I can think of for why you're NOT doing this already, granted how common-sensical it would be to do so given your stated aims, is the cynical reason of not wanting users to be able to take to the internet with screenshotted evidence that your policies are being enforced in a specious or uneven manner.

With the current absurdly opaque enforcement system and exceedingly vague guidelines, it would appear that at this rate I am left with no other solution than to just simply never engage in commenting on YouTube at all if I want to keep my account. It would seem that there is something embarrassingly deficient with your current system and approach if that is the case for someone like me who engages on your platform in good faith, but what do I know...