My ode to YouTube comments
This started on Friday morning. I had grand productivity plans. Before I started on those plans, I thought…Let me just check my phone to make sure I’m not missing out on anything.
Checked my email. Nothing important. Checked Whatsapp. My texts. Nothing I need to reply to.
Ok, guess it’s time to get to work.
But there was one more thing. Let me…just…check YouTube.
I’m not a slave to the personalized algorithms. So I never look at what YouTube recommends for me. Instead, I subscribe to the channel Popular on YouTube. I much prefer a general algorithm to a personal one.
I look…and see…Jimmy Fallon?! Jimmy Fallon addressing the violence at the U.S. Capitol? This sounds like something Jimmy Kimmel would do?
Not typical Fallon, but I think he did a pretty good job. Let’s see what others are saying about this. Time to check out the comment section before I go to work.
I hate the phrase ‘lol’, but this first comment literally made me laugh out loud.
Now I was hooked. I couldn’t stop scrolling. And the comments seemed to follow some sort of unwritten rule: a quotation followed by the person responsible for that quote.
I file this one in the unrelated but hilarious bucket.
The next one seemed to potentially relate to the Jimmy Fallon clip, but with a Star Wars quote from Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The next commenter somehow had a username from Star Wars while transitioning to an amazing Airplane quote.
The next commenter tried to bring it back to something more presidential.
The next user didn’t seem to appreciate the serious turn, and replied by returning to The Office with a classic Michael Scott quote.
Then, people started getting more meta with a series of self-quotes.
Then, there were three consecutive amazing comments that each had me laughing harder than the one before.
Finally, I wiped away the tears forming in my eyes from laughing so hard when I came to the next Star Wars quote.
This was beautiful. To me, the best of social media. There’s no fame in YouTube commenting. No ads you’re running to earn money. An organic quote thread emerged and it was hilarious and maybe even a little thought-provoking. The comments seemed to follow one another into a perfect tale that was the funniest piece of content I’d read in weeks.
There’s only one problem. That’s not what happened.
Sure, those were the comments as they showed up on my feed. But the order did not make sense. Let me show you the timestamp, the likes, and the replies of the comments as they appeared on my thread.
Who is deciding on this order? Of course there’s some algorithm, but who can explain it with results like this? There were over 15,000 comments on this video that was not even two days old.
It was awesome to read, but it didn’t make sense. It was as if some human curated this, but yet it was really a computer that did this.
So I scrolled to the very bottom. It took me nearly 5 minutes of scrolling, but I just wanted to see what showed up last.
The second-to-last comment.
The very last comment.
I don’t know what my point is, but I know a lot of questions are swirling in my head.
Is it fair that these comments show up last on my feed?
What responsibility does YouTube have in the display of comments?
How can you not think of social media platforms as publishers when you see the curation and order behind this comment thread?
I don’t want to end on such a somber note, so I’m going to leave you with a few of my other favorite comments that I saw scrolling through the thread.
