I undeniably love YouTube and all the free unique material content creators put out. I follow many channels religiously and have even stopped watching cable as a result. From my many years on the platform, I–like many others–have easily noticed the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the YouTube comment section. It is littered with literal non-sense, vulgarities, obscenities, prejudices and anything vile you can think of. It is anything than a system to leave constructive feedback to a content creator. I have no idea why something that can be used in a positive way to write feedback that can alter a content creator’s channel in the audience’s favor is so unbearable to read. How have people stooped to this level to transcribe death threats to someone because they didn’t like their favorite content creator’s recent upload. Has the anonymous access to messaging lowered people’s moral standards, allowing them to speak whatever evil comes into their mind directly to someone? Does the lack of face to face interaction ensue vulgarity and hostility as you can say whatever you want with no consequences? I honestly have no idea. The concept that freedom of literature creation has made an environment of great negativity is baffling to me. I never would have thought that unlimited literature access and creation could have such detrimental outcomes. I guess too much freedom with limited regulation allows harm to exist.
I can identify completely with your post. As someone who also grew up admiring YouTubers and interesting channels, I also do not understand why “Your mom’s gay” is an appropriate response to someone talking about how to build a homemade drone. While there are people out there that feel their sole purpose is to instigate problems in other peoples’ business, what really made me mad was when people would advertise their own channel or a product on a video that has little to no relation to the subject at hand. Not only is it unnecessary, but it detracts from the person that’s trying to entertain or teach something new. YouTube’s feature of disabling comments does help filter out the garbage comments, but is this restricting someone’s free speech?
As someone who has gotten pretty into youtube over the past couple years, I totally understand where you’re coming from. Seeing some of the vile and unwarranted comments people leave on creators’ videos was astonishing at first, but as I become a more avid consumer of content, I think I became desensitized to it. Some creators even make videos where they feature hate comments, so I think they’ve been desensitized to it too. I really do think that the hostility on the internet can be owed to the faceless nature of it. I bet few people would say such nasty things to people if the conversation was in person.
Like everyone here, I am also a YouTube fan. I think that the comment section can easily be a place for Jenkins’s participatory culture to blossom, but instead people use it to troll. I think in part its because people are garbage. But as we’ve learned, there is also a lot of power in written language, and the comment section is a great way to exploit it for personal pride.