What the comments on YouTube really mean.
Back in early 2000 my first internet job was at a failed dotcom called Lineup that wanted to be YouTube, Revver, Roo, et cetera. The company failed for many reasons — many of them the usual suspects with Bubble 1.0 startups — but the main reason was that when Lineup debuted its broadband video portal home broadband access was still microscopic. Numbers differ, but according to Nielsen//NetRatings, home broadband penetration didn’t cross the 50 percent mark among internet-using Americans until September of 2004– nearly four years after I left Lineup (it shut its doors shortly thereafter).
Earlier this week at the iMedia Brand Summit in Las Vegas, I was reminiscing with a fellow veteran of those early online video years. “Why?” she asked, “is YouTube such a hit? And why didn’t people embrace IFILM the same way?” We kicked around different ideas for a while. One obvious answer is that YouTube is easier than IFILM: there is no editorial control at YouTube; users simply upload their video and the community does the rest. It is an exercise in the dubious wisdom of crowds.
However, I think that the truth is more complicated: I think one big reason for the mind-boggling success of YouTube, Facebook and MySpace is the inane comments.
The internet is awash in viral and wannabe-viral videos, so much so that it’s an epidemiologist’s worst nightmare or wet dream. Two of my recent favorites (you’ve probably seen them, but if not what treats await you!) are Smirnoff’s Tea Partay (one and a quarter million views) and Judson Laipply’s Evolution of Dance (three and a quarter million views). If you check them out, don’t miss the endless scroll of visitor comments below the video window.
In each case you’ll find that the comments are… nothing special.
This is in contrast to the engaged and thoughtful commentary on some blogs. For example, two of my favorite media bloggers — Grant McCracken and Henry Jenkins have tons of long and deep comments from users.
But the YouTube comments (and Facebook, et cetera) are inane. Yes, this is a judgment, but how else do you characterize super-brief comments like, “crap!” “brilliant” “this guy sucks” “OMG so funny” and the like. 315 people commented on Tea Partay and 9799 commented on Laipply. None of these comments were more than a few lines, and in many the viewers went off on each other about their opinions.
So what drives thousands of people to leave inane comments?
These comments are a way for viewers to connect with each other– so much is obvious, but that connection, that vestigial exercise in community is worth examining.
The difference between watching movie in the theater and watching it alone in your house is profound because once you add other people that viewing experience can become eventful. Here, I’m talking about “eventness” in the Bakhtinian sense; the Russian word for it is “sobytiinost’.” Eventness involves another key term from Bakhtin (he was a brilliant Russian thinker from the mid-twentieth century): unrepeatability. A movie is endlessly repeatable, but the collection of viewers in the audience will probably never coalesce again. The presence of other people makes us experience a movie differently: we’re more likely to laugh out loud, for example. Watching a performance collectively, we ourselves perform our role as audience.
The comments on YouTube are a way for viewers to smuggle a little bit of unrepeatable eventness into an otherwise repeatable experience. And this, I think, shows how much we crave connection from within the yawning cavern of our isolation amidst the cacophony of media that crowds us.
Before TV and radio and movies and the internet, people had to make their own culture. Community theater was a bigger deal and more people played instruments at home. People had a more artisinal experience of culture, and that was inherently eventful.
Social technologies like YouTube have the potential to reinvest eventness into otherwise uneventful digital culture.
14 Responses to “What the comments on YouTube really mean.”
1 Kathi 14 September 2006 @ 11:43 pm
Okay, I feel a liiiiittttttle self-conscious writing this comment–but hey, I’m marking the eventness of really digging this post. If I delay and write later 1) I won’t bother; 2) it will feel less like a conversation. That’s what I like about posting: you get to have a conversation with the author in a way that feels authentic b/c your brain is buzzing in response. How many times have I wished for that as I read a book? Like a zillion. George Eliot would have gotten so totally sick of me.
Now for the generically obligatory post:
OMG, epidemilogist’s wet dream, LOL!
2 Miguel Alvarez 15 September 2006 @ 6:59 pm
OMG… this post rocks! (kidding)
Thanks for this insightful view into the apparently
lame comments at Youtube and other viral community
websites.
This is the very first thing I’ve read from you,
=but if you keep writing blog posts like this one
I’ll definitely become a regular. =)
All the best!
Miguel Alvarez
CEO, ThirdSphere Hosting
http://ThirdSphere.com/
3 M. Kroger 10 December 2006 @ 10:52 am
A refreshing outlook on this aspect of YouTube, although I wish the option members have of checking comments before they’re posted was obligatory. Destructive comments are distracting and tiresome – I hope I’m not alone in thinking this.
4 David 2 July 2007 @ 9:12 am
I think your take on YouTube comments is great.
However, I hate reading YouTube comments because so many of them are profane or insulting. Why would I want to post something on YouTube only to be insulted and sworn at for my effort?
If this were community theater, the audience would applaud and even give a standing ovation if appropriate. But boos would be very rare, and having people stand up and shout the ‘F’ word would be unheard of.
What do you think about this disintregration of culture? If I post, is there anything I can do to encourage positive and constructive comments, or should I just disable comments?
5 Brad Berens 5 July 2007 @ 9:51 am
Hi David,
Thanks for your comment on http://www.mediavorous.com. I think I might be less sensitive to the language issues than you are, and I’m always cognizant of Oscar Wilde’s quip that the only thing worse than being talked about is NOT being talked about. If your goal is to get people to watch your stuff, then “that’s f***ing rad!” is better than no comment at all, right?
Lots of community powered sites have language filters, although I must confess that I don’t know if YouTube has such an option. On mediavorous, I’m sufficiently worried about comment spam (a bigger problem than mere profanity if the hundreds of autoscripted viagara pitches I clean out each week are any indication) to have a manual release in place for all comments. If you, as I do, manually filter all comments then you will be able to delete the offensive ones ahead of posting.
Don’t know if this helps, but I hope it does.
All best,
Brad Berens
6 awapseply 7 July 2007 @ 10:36 am
good work
7 Geo 3 September 2007 @ 11:03 pm
YouTube just RUINED the comments system. You can no longer read all the comments in a threaded form.
8 maikmidlooks 18 September 2007 @ 3:52 am
Hi
I’ve recently found an excellent video :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB6hHiRu5Ak
Regards
maik midlooks
9 kim 10 October 2007 @ 11:02 am
I LOVE YOU TUBE ITS TOTALLY AWESOME
righton
10 ProfessionalGun 17 November 2007 @ 9:29 pm
Hi Brad –
This is a great perspective on user comments and their meaning. I’m accustomed to reading blogs with relatively intelligent readers, so when I look at the comments on YouTube, I’m filled with a deep remorse for the state of humanity. That may sound heavy – but it’s honest. Comments on YouTube seem to be written by people who don’t care in the least about contributing worth or perpetuating intelligent conversation. As a result, YouTube, one of the most popular sites on the internet, only serves as a deplorable cross-section of society. Hopefully it’s just a demographic that has yet to mature.
11 Idetrorce 15 December 2007 @ 5:36 am
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
12 ‘Put the bomb in the leather bag’ « the prestidigitator 2 January 2008 @ 2:51 am
[...] What You Tube comments really mean [...]
13 Atlantaventures 14 January 2008 @ 7:36 pm
Key difference – letting your audience create the content and create the dialogue – it’s called relationships! AOL got it – the buddy list – my first dot com experience and I recently came across – an Atlanta based venture backed firm called http://www.realviewtv.com/ – shown here -that provides online streaming video platform to help smbs leverage video and viral elements to develop relationships with their own customers.
14 Anthony (S’pore) 15 January 2008 @ 7:28 am
The idea of youtube is great: it offers posters ways to show their ideas & works while visitors find ways to watch videos that they won’t find elsewhere otherwise.
However youtube.com seems to give a damn about user comments to the posters’ videos: abusive, racial attacks, extremely offensive comments are displayed without any control by the site management. There’s also no way to report such users/ posters who are destroying the character of the site that way either. If you won’t believe me go to youtube and search for user names like GooksExposed, VietGookSlave, DatPhatBich etc.
I really don’t understand that youtube is allowing those mental people to post and to comment.
For me as a parent there’s NO WAY to let my child surfing on youtube alone!!!