The worst place on the internet is also the best place on the internet

In this column, we deliver hot (and cold) takes on pop culture, judging whether a subject is overrated or underrated.

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By now, 20 years into this egregious online experiment, we can all agree: the world is infinitely worse thanks to social media. We once were blissfully blind, just sitting on stoops and eating cereal till dinnertime, but now we see – harassment, misinformation, narcissism and, um, Skibidi Toilets made quotidian.

Like, just the other day: all those original thinkers who believed it was their duty to share the exact same Anthony Bourdain quote about Henry Kissinger that 50 million other people already shared to 300 million other people. “Always remember the words of Anthony Bourdain when thinking about Henry Kissinger,” they posted, as though they didn’t also just first read it in a tweet five minutes ago like the rest of us. Why are you trying to claim credit for discovering an Anthony Bourdain quote about Henry Kissinger? That’s a weird thing to do.

YouTube comments, home of the internet’s most well-adjusted commenters (mostly).Credit: YouTube

Sharing thoughts and opinions online is overrated and anyone who does it is a no-friends saddo (ha, you know, present company excluded). But there’s one place online where sharing is increasingly beautiful, and that’s YouTube comments.

YouTube comments are the 70 per cent dark chocolate of internet comments: rich, nuanced and delicious. Look at any other comments board on the internet and it’s all white chocolate-covered licorice: just “bleugh” and “grrr” and “you suck”. YouTube comments are the only internet comments where you read them and leave feeling better or, at least, neutral about humanity. There are three kinds of YouTube comments, and they’re all wonderful (I can’t guarantee this is accurate).

1: There are the comments that make you feel seen, connected to your fellow beings on a niche level you can’t believe.

There I was, looking up the clip of Renee Elise Goldsberry singing My Home Court from John Mulaney’s Sondheim spoof, Original Cast Album: Co-Op, from Documentary Now!, when, commenting four years ago, some user named @evangar wrote: “I find myself muttering ‘and the brown and the beige and the brown and the beige’ all the time”. Same! The comment has 288 thumbs up, which means I have at least 289 soulmates across the world muttering “the brown and the beige” right now. That’s an incredible thing to realise (I still don’t want to meet any of them).

2: There are the comments that should be immediately adapted into arthouse Hollywood dramas. For example, YouTube any sad song in existence like, say, Elliott Smith’s The Biggest Lie, and you’ll find this:

“When I decided to kill myself, I took a bus to the bad part of town where they sell heroin on the street. I tried to buy 60 dollars worth of heroin but the dealer only had 50 dollars worth so I told him to keep the change since I wouldn’t be needing it. After that, I went into a nearby alley. I didn’t have any syringes so I picked up a used one off the ground because what did it matter anyway. I told myself, ‘Well, this is how you die, I guess, alone in an alley in a strange town far from home.’ After I did the shot and I sat lying there ‘waiting for sleep to overtake me’, I realised the heroin was fake. I didn’t even have money to get home on the bus so I had to walk back four miles. So when Elliott says, ‘You spent everything you had, wanted everything to stop that bad’, it has a very deep, painful and personal meaning to me.”

Who would make that up? It’s so tragic. But then responding to that comment, there’s some guy right underneath going, “You just gotta laugh. Thank f— he sold you fake heroin!” so it all balances out, I guess.

A-grade arts criticism is everywhere in YouTube comments.Credit: YouTube

3: There’s the A-grade arts criticism, where you realise most people are actually very sensitive and thoughtful and not just robots sharing the same Anthony Bourdain quote about Henry Kissinger.

You can find it on anything. I just looked up the video for Ashlee Simpson’s Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya) and found this summary from user @oneandonlysound3453: “I liked this album but, truth is, nobody wanted to hear this in 2007. If it was out a few years ago, it woulda topped the charts, where so many are borrowing from ’80s songs or just have that vibe. Oddly enough, for someone who got so much flack for lip-syncing – which so many of them do all the time, as opposed to just once – she was actually ahead of her time.”

Yes, that sums it up. Someone get oneandonlysound3453 a job at Pitchfork.

I know what you’re thinking: “YouTube has constant issues with misogynistic and homophobic harassment against its content creators, so how can you argue that its commenters are so nice?” To which I say: good point, maybe it’s just my algorithm? (when you can’t explain something about the internet, it’s always useful to blame the algorithm). There’s also that classic staple of some ridiculous 11-year-old posting under a Marilyn Manson video and going, “I wish I was alive in 1999, this was real music!” So, just to confuse you: yes, YouTube comments can also be very, very bad.

But, because YouTube is a site where people generally search for things they like rather than react to things they don’t, the comments tend to run more enlightened. Depending on your own prior search history – I mean, you’ll be skewing the wrong way if you went through a dark period where you were really into videos of murder and/or Ricky Gervais stand-up – you’ll find a lot of life in YouTube’s comments section. And it’s mostly good, which in the world of social media is rarer than an original quote about dead ol’ Henry Kissinger.

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