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

Abstract

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 the person the platform recorded. The divergence is not random: it occurs in 41.5% of replies at the deepest available level and in none at all one level up. Research on threaded comment data treats the recorded reply edge as the conversational relation. Herring and Chae (2021) distinguish reply relation, addressee relation and content relation conceptually, and code them by hand on 600 comments; the alignment literature on Twitter and Reddit takes the observed reply edge as the relevant interlocutor. What has not been tested is which of two competing, observable recipient signals the surface language follows when they disagree. This study uses a corpus of 52,865 YouTube comments from 16 videos, retrieved with genuine parent edges to depth 3 under two ranking conditions. Replies whose leading @-name resolves unambiguously to exactly one account in the same thread yield 9,542 analysable cases, of which 7,629 agree with the recorded parent and 1,913 diverge. The divergence is structurally located. At depth 2 it occurs in 0 of 4,838 cases. At depth 3 — the deepest level YouTube stores — it occurs in 1,886 of 4,548 (41.5%). This is the signature of a display constraint, not of speaker behaviour: the platform stores four levels, and a reply that belongs deeper is attached to the last node with room. In 848 length-matched divergent cases, after deduplication across the two ranking strata, content-word overlap with the @-target exceeds overlap with the recorded parent (paired difference +0.0284, permutation p < 0.001, 63.0% of individual cases). A positive control on 7,289 agreement cases establishes that the measure detects conversational reference rather than shared topic: the parent scores 0.1145 against 0.0550 for a random third comment from the same thread. Function-word profiles show no difference (p = 0.30), locating the effect in contentrather than in style. The recorded parent is not noise — it also beats the placebo — but where the two pointers disagree, the text follows the name.