Role Inversion and Performative Collapse in Cross-Channel Comment Interaction: A Micro Digital Ethnography of Reflexive Participation on YouTube

This publication presents a micro digital ethnographic study examining role inversion and behavioral persistence across YouTube comment environments. Following antagonistic engagement on the author’s own channel, the researcher entered the antagonist’s channel and deliberately mirrored the original discursive style through exaggerated, low-content commentary. Using screenshots of the resulting interactions as a fixed empirical dataset, the study analyzes how performative dominance, irony, and dismissive rhetoric behave when transferred across asymmetric social contexts. The findings indicate that such behaviors are highly context-dependent and collapse under reflexive symmetry, particularly when their performative structure is explicitly surfaced. The work demonstrates that reflexive participant-observer role inversion can function as a diagnostic method in digital ethnography, revealing latent power dependencies and non-portable discourse strategies within platform-mediated interactions.