Max Sedlmair

Official renamings and incidental mentions: Revision-level evidence from English Wikipedia

Place names are never just labels. Throughout history, names of cities, rivers, mountains and seas have been contested, renegotiated and changed back again — Constantinople and Istanbul, Danzig and Gdańsk, Bombay and Mumbai. A renaming is decided in a single act. Whether the new...

Flattened Conversations: Reply-Structure Loss in YouTube Comment Data

Research on YouTube comment sections routinely reconstructs who replied to whom. That edge list comes from one of two collection methods, and they do not agree. This report measures the disagreement on identical material. Two videos were collected both through the official YouTub...

Reconstructed Time: Comment Timestamps in Interface-Level YouTube Extraction: A Measurement Report

The extraction tool yt-dlp emits a Unix timestamp for every YouTube comment it retrieves. The field is not a measurement. YouTube's web interface publishes only a coarse relative label — one year ago, three weeks ago — and the absolute value is derived from that label by subtract...

Storm Names as Comparative Benchmarks: Lay Referential Uptake of Institutional Weather Names in German YouTube Comments.

In brief. German storms are given names — Kyrill, Sabine, Lothar. This study asks what ordinary speakers do with those names years afterwards. The answer is that they mostly use them to measure: people write worse than Kyrill or will it be as bad as Lothar?, treating the old name...

Two Pointers, One Recipient: Linguistic Orientation Where Reply Edges and @-Addresses Diverge in YouTube Comment Trees Max Sedlmair · O

In brief. A YouTube reply carries two indications of whom it answers. The platform records a parent comment, and the text often begins with an @-name. Usually they agree. Sometimes they do not — and when they diverge, the reply’s wording tracks the person named in the text, not t...

Two Pointers, One Recipient: Linguistic Orientation Where Reply Edges and @-Addresses Diverge in YouTube Comment Trees Max Sedlmair · O

In brief. A YouTube reply carries two indications of whom it answers. The platform records a parent comment, and the text often begins with an @-name. Usually they agree. Sometimes they do not — and when they diverge, the reply’s wording tracks the person named in the text, not t...

Storm Names as Comparative Benchmarks: Lay Referential Uptake of Institutional Weather Names in German YouTube Comments.

In brief. German storms are given names — Kyrill, Sabine, Lothar. This study asks what ordinary speakers do with those names years afterwards. The answer is that they mostly use them to measure: people write "worse than Kyrill" or "will it be as bad as Lothar?", treating the old...

Beyond Babel: What Remains When No Certainty Remains — An Introduction to Reflexive Minimalism

An essayistic introduction to a philosophical project grounded in epistemic finitude, written for readers without formal philosophical training. It begins from a contemporary predicament: we have never communicated more and rarely understood one another less, while nuclear weapon...

Beyond Babel: What Remains When No Certainty Remains — An Introduction to Reflexive Minimalism

An essayistic introduction to a philosophical project grounded in epistemic finitude, written for readers without formal philosophical training. It begins from a contemporary predicament: we have never communicated more and rarely understood one another less, while nuclear weapon...

Beyond Babel: What Remains When No Certainty Remains — An Introduction to Reflexive Minimalism

An essayistic introduction to reflexive minimalism, written for readers without formal philosophical training. It begins from a contemporary predicament: we have never communicated more and rarely understood one another less, while nuclear weapons, a warming planet, and arguing m...