Questions I’d like to know the answer to: why are YouTube comments so poor?
Comments posted on YouTube films are notoriously poor.
Some of the films are pretty poor too, but whilst for films there is a range from the great to the awful, with the bizarre, inspired and just weird along the way, comments on them are overall of a very low standard.
So low in fact that there’s a YouTube Comment Snob extension for Firefox:
You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:
- More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker.
- All capital letters
- No capital letters
- Doesn’t start with a capital letter
- Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
- Excessive capitalization
- Profanity
Or as You Suck At Websites put it in a post which is now offline: “The Ultimate Proof of Human Idiocy”. The now ex-post included the tale of how a clip of a sneezing panda ended up with a comment threat that meandered on to 9/11 conspiracy theories and a demand for hangings. This is also a neat example of what so many YouTube comments are like.
But, why?
YouTube has a range of functions to deal with comments – rating, tagging as spam and so on. It has a large pool of users. It has some great content.
There are some half-answers, such as the culture amongst commenters being a self-reinforcing cycle, driving away others, and the way that there are often discussions around YouTube clips in other places (the sites where they are embedded).
UPDATE: Come across this rather apposite quote from Lev Grossman in Time magazine (13 December 2006): “Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and naked hatred”.
You’re right about the culture – but I think the main problem is a low barrier to entry. To make a comment on this (or most other blogs) you need to have a high standard of litteracy. To make your point, you need to be as good or better at wordsmithing than the other authors.
Because of the disparity between video and text, that barrier is removed. Any idiot can watch & listen – but the ability to reason is almost totally removed with the viewing of video.
Given the high production values of (some) videos, there’s little a “normal” user can do to make a meaningful & influential video response. So their arguments often come out as “Ur al ghey! Lol!!!11!1”
The final piece of the puzzle is moderation. Most blogs moderate comments to make sure nonsense doesn’t prevail – for some reason, that rarely happens on YouTube.
I blame Beavis and Butthead. (Not that most YouTube commenters will be old enough to remember them.) Culture of cynicsm as the correct response to video. But at least they were funny.
Because it has a higher number of kids using it than the average website, if you ask me.
People go to Youtube because someone says there’s something cool there. Then they say whatever’s on their mind in response to the video or the existing comments and go away. There is little chance that person will return to that Youtube clip. There’s also little chance that anyone they know will be reading through that comments thread.
Basically, with a few exceptions, there isn’t enough of a community around each youtube channel to make the comments more than a graffitti wall.
Good points, thanks.
Also a couple of similar points made on Twitter:
craigelder @markpack Interesting point re: YouTube comments. I reckon one reason is because, unlike on blogs, chances of interaction with author is low
colmhowardlloyd @craigelder @markpack YouTube traditionally a universal used respository (ie bung-up and leave) rather than a place to actually interact.
I think there’s a lot of merit in this, but it’s worth bearing in mind some people on YouTube do try to be interactive. The wider reputation of YouTube probably damages those efforts regardless of their intrinsict merit.
I don’t know; but I’ve found repeatedly that when I have tried to make a comment it never gets posted. Any reason why? (I was logged in when this happened.)
That’s surprising as I’ve not come across general complaints along those lines. Are you often putting in URLs, which means the comments are being stopped as suspect spam? Or have you tried using different computer / browser?
No URLs that I remember. I haven’t tried a different computer or browser, maybe that’s it. (I use Firefox.) Thanks for the quick response!