Here’s a list of some awful things in no particular order:
I could go on because lord knows there are untold amounts of more awfulness in the world, but that’s probably enough for what I’m about to do. All of the above items are terrible, but to even come close to matching the level of abject terribleness that is found on any random page of YouTube comments, you’d have to take every item from that list, squash them all together and then bake the vile combination into a pizza crust that is topped with glass shrapnel, syphilitic ape hair, fingernail clippings, and some soggy cigarette butts, and then serve it to your last surviving grandparent. Who is on fire.
Seriously, those trolls hiding under the bridge in the Three Billy Goats Gruff won’t even go near YouTube comment pages.
Okay, so enough hyperbole. You get the point. For some inexplicable reason, YouTube comment sections have become the locus for the end of civilization and it’s been going that way for years with no sign of ever getting better. Racism, sexism, classism, hate-ism – if it’s bad, it’s happening right now on YouTube.
However, YouTube may be approaching a new era of quasi-civility, according to YouTube Head of Product Dror Shimshowitz. Talking in a Q&A session at Google I/O this week, Wired reports that Shimshowitz said Google will be making some changes to YouTube that will hopefully weed out the mutants that populate the website’s comment sections. “We’re working on some improvements to the comment system, so hopefully we’ll have an update on that in the next few months,” Shimshowitz told an audience member.
According to Wired, that was about all Shishowitz would share about the plan to eradicate the corruption of YouTube comments.
While this is certainly going to be a welcome change to the website, and maybe you’ll actually be able to find some useful discourse on some of your favorite videos there, the eviction of awful YouTube comments will likely leave a small, asymmetrical hole in the internet. If anything else, I will miss coming across those hilarious Buzzfeed articles that collect some of the best finds in the muck of YouTube comments.