My suspicions match your footnotes—this is probably accidental and fragile, so attempting to mess with it to get other dimensions of value (in propagating ideas orthogonal to the video, or monetizing, or influencing anything) is going to make it go away.
That said, it’d be interesting to measure and see if there IS a unique/special value—some tracking of popularity of videos that you comment on, then a randomization of NOT commenting on some things you were about to (literal coin flip or other no-judgement procedure) and tracking if the comments impact the popularity of the video would give you a bit of signal that the comment IS providing value in some way, which you could then figure out how to exploit.
My suspicions match your footnotes—this is probably accidental and fragile, so attempting to mess with it to get other dimensions of value (in propagating ideas orthogonal to the video, or monetizing, or influencing anything) is going to make it go away.
That said, it’d be interesting to measure and see if there IS a unique/special value—some tracking of popularity of videos that you comment on, then a randomization of NOT commenting on some things you were about to (literal coin flip or other no-judgement procedure) and tracking if the comments impact the popularity of the video would give you a bit of signal that the comment IS providing value in some way, which you could then figure out how to exploit.