Today’s Rant: Youtube Comments

This may be the most snooty entry I have yet, but quite frankly, nothing depresses and enrages me more than the quality of discourse surrounding 90% of Youtube videos. This is a singular problem that anonymous communication seems to cause.

I will admit that many of the videos are of astoundingly low quality in terms of content, so perhaps the asinine exchanges of gay accusations to follow are only a natural product of the terrible video itself. Nevertheless, in many other area of anonymous or semi-anonymous discourse (such as forums, bulletin boards, etc.) moderators are deployed to keep things civil and ban arrogant dicks who apparently cop a wicked buzz from insulting people they’ve never met and know nothing about.

In Youtube, though, all bets are off. This is the bottom of the nearly bottomless chum bucket of internet forums. Anyone who tries to say anything even moderately relevant will be drowned in a sea of casual hatred and near-illiterate ramblings. I fear for the literacy rate of our country when people can’t spell words like “when” correctly. The only source of moderation is from the posters themselves; if enough people label a comment “irrelevant” it is blocked visually, though you can still click on it to read it if you want. Since most of these people are the same people spewing flaming gibberish at their imagined foes, you can guess that this feature is not used very often.

There seems to be a virtual age reduction that occurs on the internet. I see many posts that are so fatuous, stupid, or poorly spelled that I have to think they were posted by a ten-year old. I would venture to guess that half of them actually are posted by ten-year olds, and I am frankly disgusted by their use of terminology that would make a sailor blush. Of course they picked these hate-mongering (and often racist) words from the selfsame forum. Figures. But the other half are probably teenagers of all ages and description who revert to little whining babies when suddenly they don’t have to take responsibility for their actions. This is a sensible conclusion to draw, if you make the assumption that people are basically assholes. I’m still on the fence about this one. I’ve met some genuinely nice people now and again. A rare breed, perhaps.

By the same token, one of my friends (Mike Wakcher, creator of circlerversussquare.com) often tries to have an intelligent conversation about his web comics in so-called “art” forums, where people are supposedly gathering to actually have a real discussion, weighing things like pros and cons and defending their points of view with things like facts, and making it clear when something is an opinion. He has had very little luck finding people who don’t take offense when he tries to defend himself intellectually against their comments. Let me make this clear: these people are offended that Mike is attempting to have a rational discussion as opposed to simply blithely accepting their poorly reasoned commentary. The whole process for them is an emotional one, not a rational one, so they are often flabbergasted when Mike easily reasons their point away.

You would think that casting aside all manners and good sense would be liberating at first but boring after a while. But it appears to be going strong. The only other solution is that there are only a few genuine adults online and it is otherwise infested with actual 10 year-old boys. I put it past 10 year-old girls to give a damn about insulting people anonymously. Correct me if I’m wrong.