Stay Away From Youtube Comments
Posted in Technology on 01. Feb, 2010
Wow, stay away from Youtube comments. This is something hopefully most people know already. It seems like Youtube is the worst place online for comments and social interaction. My bud and I have an ongoing thing about who can find the most misplaced, odd or just plain offensive comments completely unrelated to the video people are commenting on. We’ve seen some funny, harmless comments to comments that are so horrible it would make Santa Clause vomit with rage.
Some comments are placed on videos by trolls. A troll is someone who posts controversial things online just to get a kick outta’ people’s reactions. (A great, long article about trolls titled Conversation Hackers).
But a lot of comments on Youtube are sincere. Some are hateful, racist comments. Some are horribly vile comments posted on uploaded family home movies at the beach with kids (you can imagine what the comments could be). And others are just a crazy waste of time and completely off topic.
Take this awesome video about Gmail. I used it tonight in a web page for johnBbaird.com. This video has no words and just shows people doin’ crazy things with the Gmail logo. So I made the mistake of reading the comments of the video (because comments change, I’ve included them below…
User1 (1 day ago)
lolcant seem to find a man who can treat me like a princess
User2 (5 days ago)
hujust cant seem to find a prince who knows his way around a womans body
What the freak?? If your wondering what this conversation’s about… that’s the entire conversation! All other comments were about Gmail. How on Earth do you get ANY of that from… a wordless Gmail video?? When you read this crap, instead of simply dismissing it, you go “What the heck??” and waste time loading old comments just so see if you can make sense outta’ that jibba’ jabba’ nonsense.
That example there is a pretty tame version of the craziness you can find on Youtube comments. Now, if you want a kick or want a laugh, sure, go ahead and read Youtube comments. But I’m gonna’ tell ya, most of the time you go to read comments to get a kick or a laugh, you end up disappointed by people just talking about stupid boring things. (“how do u jailbreak teh iphone 2g ??” “This is a promotional video for Alcoholics Anonymous, there are no cell phones even mentioned in the video…”) Then when you find a video that is crazy meaningful to you and you happen to glance down at the comments, you see something offensive said that ruins your mood.
So something me and my friends learned years ago is something I wanna’ pass onto you; don’t read Youtube comments.
Haha, crazy Youtube…
Peace, JbB
