I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there.
They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.
I know K-12 educators who post videos primarily for their students and fellow local teachers, and they disable comments and voting because bored kids will fill the comments with crap, and scammers will target the kids.
Yes, but cause and effect are reversed from the teacher's perspective. They mark the video as "made for kids" because that's the easiest way to disable comments.
My first thought was that comments in many online spaces, including youtube, can simply be mean. If I was responsible for the online presence of a course I wouldn't want my lecturers to have to deal with random people commenting on their bad haircut or annoying voice, for example.
It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. It's an expense to have someone going through comments.
Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform.
McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space."
There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev."
You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform.
If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8
I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there.
They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.