Campster
@Campster

In my TikTok video last year I mentioned a guy named Jake Novak who got harassed off the internet for the high crime of being kinda cringe. Well, on the one year anniversary of the TikTok that caused his life to implode, he's posted a joke TikTok as a sign of life.

And like... good for him. It's not that it's a happy ending, but the fact that he's still around and able to do comedy despite the entire internet going nuts and throwing death threats and vitriol at him for a month and a half over anodyne comedy songs is something, at least. Seeing someone get back up and dust themselves off after that kind thing is impressive, frankly.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

didn't see anything about this when it happened, don't know anything about the person, never heard of them or the situation, etc. but i skimmed the video in question and it made me have some thoughts about online and the dogpile problem in general.


despite being in the (enviable?) position of having a youtube channel with virtually zero negative audience response to anything i upload, i still get affected by it, because (here's the thesis of this post up front) I think that for every deliberate "let's destroy this person" 4chan-style "raid," there are ten million completely inadvertent, unplanned, unstructured, and oblivious dogpiles comprised of thousands of independent actions, and it will eternally and forever be like this as long as there are comments sections.

if i make a minor mistake in a video, 500 people point it out. none of them checked to see if anyone else made that same comment. and it's not just the day after I post the video, or the week after. six months later, a year later, i get an email. i have a new comment. it's about the mistake i made a year ago.

you cannot head this off. nobody reads the description, on-screen text, subtitles, nothing. people don't even finish the video! people don't finish the video before commenting!!!!! so if you say anything that COULD be interpreted as wrong, even if you provide the necessary context thirty seconds later: congratulations! you just earned hundreds of comments from well-meaning folks who are not trying to be pricks.

that's the thing!! almost NOBODY who comments on my videos is TRYING to be a douchebag. they usually soft-peddle their correction, couch it in terms of "oh it's easy to not know this" or "i think you might have misinterpreted" - it's the gentlest possible way to be corrected. but i'm still being corrected. over and over. forever. on something that i already knew i'd gotten wrong before i even released the video, or maybe something that wasn't wrong at all if they had just watched a few more seconds.

the chilling effect from this is tremendous. i have backed off massively on what i'm willing to say in a video, and every single word I write or say goes through the same filter: "what will someone with absolutely no knowledge outside of their bedroom hear when I say this?" it massively constrains my creative potential, because before i can do any kind of experiment, i have to ask myself, "will this confuse people? will i get reviewbombed, effectively, by randos who watched this for 30 seconds, wrinkled their noses, and decided the right reaction was to do things that would make other people less likely to even try watching this, or anything else i make, by associating my name with a bunch of vitriol?"

i am having one of the nicest experiences anyone has ever had on youtube, and it still grinds me down. and what's fucked up is that even the positive responses grind me down.

i post a video about a weird laptop. 500 people reply "oh i had this machine, and [...]" followed by two paragraphs or sometimes a full page of text detailing their entire history with the device, where they got it and when, how they used it, who they gave it to when they were done with it. and i'm feeling so bad because i don't care, i couldn't care less. why would i care? why do they think i care?

well, that last one's really easy: because most people aren't media personalities. most people don't have many friends, if any at all, and they simply aren't used to having any outlet to talk about the things they want to talk about.

for the last 12-15 years of my life, I've had access to a social circle that was willing to listen to me talk about just about anything, and since I'm articulate, it doesn't even really matter if it's a shared interest; I can get people who know nothing about The Computer to listen to me talk about The Computer and feel satisfied.

most people don't have that! so if you bought an HP DV6000 in 2006, and you really liked it, and it had a weird feature, and then it died when it melted its own CPU off the motherboard, you've probably been walking around for 16 years with this story bumping around in your head and nobody to tell it to. you made a purchase! you want that choice validated! the strangeness of the device made you have Thoughts! you want your ability to Think to be admired and respected! thus, you jump at anything that looks like an outlet; it's human nature.

it never occurs to this notional person that you, The Creator, simply do not have or want to have these thoughts placed on your plate. so you have to feel permanently awkward, like you're giving a fake smile to a total stranger telling you a miserable family drama story at a party every single day, and this is the most positive possible outcome of putting yourself Out There online.

an enormous number of the people who "come together" to harass someone off the internet probably aren't aware of each other. they probably don't look at the other comments. it probably does not occur to them that the person they're saying bad things about is hearing them from thousands of other people, or that they're hearing them at all.

i cannot overstate this enough: PEOPLE DO NOT THINK THE OP EVER SEES THEIR COMMENTS. people think that comment sections are a conversation between other commenters at best. most of the time, they're just shouting into the void, and the idea that someone else will ever see what they wrote is immaterial if they even consider it at all. i cannot tell you how often i've replied to a somewhat shitty comment and had the commenter reply "oh my god i didn't think you'd see this i'm so sorry I wasn't even thinking, this was so rude of me."

vox populi; people want to speak, to satisfy the itch to exert control over their world. they don't really think, or care, about being heard. so i would guess that in a lot of cases where someone gets "mobbed" off the internet, the mob has no idea they're a mob. it's just 50,000 or 500,000 people who all independently think "lol, wowwwww. i'm gonna write 'damn this song makes me want to set this guys house on fire' because overreactions are funny." none of them have been taught how to put themselves in the shoes of a person receiving half a million overreactions.

i don't see any solution. it'll just be like this forever. lie bot voice no moral

footnote: "don't read the comments"? it is literally my job to read the comments. would you feel great if you complained about your boss and 50 people glibly told you to just "not go to work"? and what, are we going to bullshit each other about why we're here to begin with? most platforms have a "disable comments" option at this point, and you know exactly why almost nobody uses it. that shit's there for news orgs.

for everybody else, the comments are the point. interactions are the social currency of online; if you didn't want them, you wouldn't be posting. humans do not do shit without a return on investment, no matter how ephemeral.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Not A Popular Creator, but as a thought experiement:

  • Initial comment is some form of "+1 for engagement/The Algorithm/Boost
  • Then follow up at the end of the video, or after you've let things digest and/or other people say the obvious stuff?

The problem isn't so much in learning to be a good commenter yourself, as the fact that so few people have any experience being on the creator's side of a comment deluge.

And, tbh, some of the blame for that can probably be placed on the naive way the first two generations of Web 2.0 social media platforms were constructed, and how they just let you be so heavily asymmetrically exposed to people. That's useful for building a following.

On the technical side, there could be things like "Your comment sounds very similar to X comment, maybe you want to make it a reply to that?" that platforms could try for the more benign stuff, but I don't have experience writing code to handle Massive Internet Crowds.

Honestly the best answer I have is "put yourself in the OPs shoes." I can't think of a better summary, because it's hard! I was never really one for leaving comments, but lately I've done it a few times on other peoples videos, and despite all the experience I've had from the other side of the table, it's tough to come up with something that I'm sure will be received well.

I left a comment on a video by MikeTech the other day, and I first took the time to search to see if anyone else had made a similar observation - there's no search function on mobile I don't think, so that required a bunch of manual scrolling, which was both time consuming and would have been impossible to do thoroughly if his audience was as large as mine, let alone a really big channel.

As far as the details... it's hard to say. Like, I DO sometimes like hearing people's personal stories. I don't have a rubric for when not to Share, since Sharing is the point, and is often valuable even when people don't realize it is.

If I think of a reasonable set of "rules" maybe I'll post em, but really it's just "ask yourself what it would be like to read your particular comment 500 times."

it never occurs to this notional person that you, The Creator, simply do not have or want to have these thoughts placed on your plate. so you have to feel permanently awkward, like you're giving a fake smile to a total stranger telling you a miserable family drama story at a party every single day

huh, this is making me rethink most of my online interactions. since i'm usually the Commenter, not the Creator in said interactions, i guess i never really understood how the other side feels about this?

i always figured it was similar to making a forum post - you record a video, talk about some specific subject, then the comments serve as replies and should be in some way related to the subject.

i personally feel like, if i ever made a video about some weird Computer Thing, i'd love to get at least a single comment also talking about the weird Computer Thing instead of the meaningless half-hearted reaction mush that youtube comments usually are. it would mean someone actually watched, and listened, and had some thoughts of their own instead of typing "first" in the funny box or whatever.

but i guess i can see how that would be tiring if there's hundreds of people talking about the same shit over and over, for months or maybe even years? i suppose there is some notion of finality in "content" creation. you make a video, and then you're done with that specific thing, and you move on to some other new thing.

that kind of makes me wonder if the comments section should exist at all. is there even a good way to use it?

I mean, above a certain level of success, I suspect it might make as much sense to pay one or more people to moderate and curate the comment section (and rotate that job every so often). Not every creator would want to do that, and not nearly every content creator could afford to, but we're also not really built to talk to thousands of strangers as humans at the moment.

don't take this as condescending because i genuinely mean it at face value: it is amazing how quickly we arrive at the same conclusions given just the tiniest taste of what this looks like from the other side.

you nailed it. once i release a video, i'm pretty much done with that subject. i'm not going to make another video about the same thing, and i'm more or less done discussing it, i've said my peace and am ready to move on to new business.

comments are weird because it's hard to encapsulate what is and isn't good, but for instance: i like hearing that i did a good job, obviously; i like hearing that it impacted you positively; i like hearing "oh man i'm gonna go dig my [item] out and mess with it now." These are all great. "[item] sucks, and here's what i hate about it" can also be good, if it's not too negative. and i certainly don't mind people having conversations in the comments, when that happens. i am, after all, trying to Stimulate The Conversation with my work.

what's bleh is when it's just "i have item too." i'm like... okay, and? what do i do with that? would you like... acknowledgement? i don't have time or energy for that. it's... i guess it's like if you played basketball and every fan wanted to talk to you for five minutes. to them it's incredible to get to talk to this player they admire, but they don't really have anything to offer you, so it's never going to be an equitable exchange.

and what's really rough is when people want to pick apart some point i made that is, in the grand scheme of things, totally unimportant, even if I was slightly wrong or didn't give the whole perspective.

that sucks, not just because i'm being drug into a conversation about How I Was Wrong, but also because it's not going to fix anything no matter how much I agree. if this WAS a two-way street, instead of a one-way-with-wide-sidewalks-that-people-can-pile-up-on, if it was possible to fix videos, that would be one thing.

but once a video is up, it's immutable due to Youtube policies. you literally cannot replace a video, it can't be done no matter how dire your situation, unless you're a megacorporation with special privileges; even channels like LTT don't have the clout. delete and reupload is not an option for countless business-related reasons.

but even if that weren't the case, video is just an extremely awkward format to modify. the tiniest change requires hours of effort, there's no way to highlight it for future viewers or to show the before/after so corrections are documented, and a video format like mine doesn't really tolerate minor changes. I can't go into the office and shoot a pickup to add 40 seconds of extra context about some button on a laptop. i would end up having to reshoot 5 minutes of surrounding content in order to make it all flow, probably in multiple takes - and that's assuming it's even still possible, that i still have the props, etc. and after hours of shooting, i then have to edit the video, update chapter timestamps... it's completely out of the question.

so that means that whenever i get a correction, even if i agree with it, and even if it's not one i'm getting corrected on over and over... well, great, now I'm acutely aware that I'm going to be Wrong, Publicly, Forever. it's totally unactionable. if i fuck up bad enough, this can end up bothering me forever. it's why i lampshade my mistakes - my last video and my next one have bits where I'm dunking on myself over an utterly incorrect thing i said about windows vista starter because i have no other way to remedy things, and my alternative is to feel embarrassed permanently.

so - "should we have comment sections on youtube?" i'll do you one better: should we have video as a mass communications method at all? it is terrible, in so many ways, and even as someone who makes it as their sole occupation now I don't dispute this. i could write an entire book about why youtube is a terrible way to communicate. the problem is, i have no better ideas. people don't read blogs. this is the closest thing to me sitting in a room and explaining something to some people, but it's sort of the worst of every world.

it doesn't have the back-and-forth of in-person, live communication, the opportunity for instantaneous collaboration and correction, and as a recorded medium that's extremely difficult to fix, errors tend to stick around forever. ugh! why are we all doing this again

thinking more about this, yeah... i guess the truth is, everyone online wants to be validated in some way, whether it's the Creator reading the comments under a video they put a lot of work into, or the Commenter leaving a witty and/or intelligent comment, expecting some kind of acknowledgement.

it's a weird type of interaction where the Commenters tend to assume they can somehow extrapolate literally anything about, and identify with, the Creator based solely on their creative output. hence the "i have item too!" comments - it's something you might discuss with a person you know, and you wrongly assume the Creator is one of those people.

it's a trap that in my opinion is really hard to avoid. it's tough to step back and realize that you actually know nothing about the real person you're interacting with, and to reconsider the interaction while taking this into account. if i see a cool video about a Computer Thing, which is a subject i'm passionate about, by someone who appears similarly passionate about the subject, there's this pathway in my brain that jumps to the wrong conclusion: "aha! i must be friends with this person!"

re "don't read the comments": obviously not really an option, due to once again, the expectations as a Creator and the whole acknowledgement thing and whatnot. but i suppose it's a balancing act? i do realize this kinda sounds like i'm an insensitive asshole, but: the only option i see here is "don't let it get to you". yeah, this answer sucks. but i don't think you'll be able to convince all Commenters ever to apply better judgement while commenting. it's hard and as you've said, most people don't even think about the Creator reading the comments at all.

also: it's only tangentially related, but this reminds me of a talk by Davey Wreden (the creator of The Stanley Parable) that i've seen a long time ago and haven't really thought about much until now. it's about being driven by external validation and how it can absolutely destroy a person (and also a couple other things, as it takes a few weird turns along the way, but at least that's the message i got out of it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKMAJ8vOMDg

"don't let it get to you" is literally the only option. like, yeah! you can either let it get to you, and suffer, or not let it get to you. those are the options. because you cannot stop it. you cannot prevent people from Commenting, and it's why I roll my eyes every time some other youtuber tries to get salty about the comments as if they're going to change anything. there is a continuous supply of new pairs of eyes that will not have seen your admonition to Do Better; september never ends.

I feel like the comments as a whole define a easier to communicate parasocial relationship between the people who enjoy the content or dislike the content and the content creator to the point where if you do not blank out at least a certain percentage of the flood it will consume your mind. Celebrities beforehand were instead found on the street or stalked by camera crews, which is in my opinion worse. If you take a break from your own channel or content, you probably aren't mobbed by people irl and forced into the personal awkward situations first hand. Don't get me wrong, I agree with your own struggles and the struggles of other content creators, and the most famous ones do get recognized. I just feel as a known person in an industry meant for parasocial interaction, it has been and always will be tumultuous. It is disconnected yet so draining, especially when everything you try as a smaller, earnest creator is likely a passion project instead of something to pay the bills. You feel more attached to your project than a more veteran movie star or voice actor just paying the bills. You aren't attached to the people commenting, but what they say can still wear you down before you can find the support of others that you actually would be looking for. As someone who barely has any content on sites I do visit, I still feel awkward as well when I don't do more or engage further even if most of not all people/furs would live without me posting regularly. It is a state of mind that definitely is tough to comprehend for people who only consume content.

iiiiii actually get accosted constantly outside of work, as it were. every time i go to RePC i get Noticed by fans, sometimes it happens at goodwill, it's even happened at the grocery store. it is as awkward as any "minor celebrity" (oof, ouch) interaction ever is. but you're still right that the volume is far far less.

i'm literally 0.01% as popular as you and i'm already getting all this, and it's caused an insane amount of stress. Human brains are not built to deal with "popularity", on either end of it. I've ended up "just not reading the comments" from all sources except my most trusted ones (cohost and extremely small discord servers), which sucks and it's not ideal for most people, but it's the only thing that's made it tolerable for me. I've had to stay extra far away from "places where my reply is expected" and "places where nobody realizes i can hear them", which are the two worst flavors for sure 🙁

i guess all i can say is, hang in there.

So the thing about this that I'm struggling with is the feeling of awkwardness at people lying down their stories in your comments with the declaration just a few paragraphs later. If people don't really expect the OP to see their comments, if the purpose of the comment was to connect with other commenters and not you, what gives rise to that awkwardness you feel? I recently went extremely viral on twitter, like thousands of retweets and hundreds of replies viral, and my experience was largely that most people interacting were trying to do things tangential to interaction with me, specifically. A lot of "I'm going to show I'm smarter by making a small, pointless, correction" or "Can someone explain what this means please?" And at that point, why give them any mental space other than morbid curiosity?
Maybe there's a correlation here, the people that are unbothered by the endless tides of corrections and notifications aren't the type of people driven to share this stuff, I just find the difference between our experiences with "Commenters" fascinating.

(As I finish this I cede it's entirely possible, even likely, it's a question of volume. Also I don't know how to properly finish my thoughts. My apologies.)

for most people that i know, if you say something, and then someone jumps up and uses your stage time to say something of their own, that becomes inextricably married to what you just did, in the eyes of the audience and the original speaker alike. it would be great if things weren't like that, but generally speaking, they're like that.