YouTube is scary

[beige_alert]

I've been wasting time with YouTube recently, and I am convinced that you are never more than three or four clicks in the "related videos" from...from...from pretty much any scary thing anyone on Earth with a computer and an Internet connection has been able to imagine in some frenzy of sickness or drugs or excessive spare time combined with alcohol and firearms. Sometimes you find wonderful things, other times, the twelve days of Christmas as played by animated farting elves (not making that up, couldn't make that up, and I've got the good taste to not provide a link to it.) Sometimes there is potentially valuable information there. If you are planning on doing something dumb, check first for videos showing how not to do it, such as "The unsafe part of shooting propane tanks".

YouTube allows people to post comments. People do. It seems every semi-popular video has literally thousands of comments. I don't read them, but you do see two or three underneath the video if you are not careful to look away. It is a gigantic display of John Gabriel's Greater Internet F*kwad Theory (link to comic containing words of concern depending on who is looking over your shoulder). I honestly can't remember ever seeing a comment that was actually worth reading. At the very very best, you get something totally pointless but harmless like YESSSSSS!1!Awesom!1! At worst.... It's the long spew of noise. There have to be millions of comments, and one assumes some valuable ones somehow made it into the archive, but there can't be many.

I really hope the system isn't organized such that someone, or, worse, a whole team, does nothing all day every day but maintain and backup the comments database, carefully making sure the long spew of pointless cursing and random slurs doesn't get lost and always gets served up to the users. I hope those tasks get mixed in with the rest of the system maintenance. Otherwise I don't know how the comments guy maintains the will to live.

Comments

[bardling.livejournal.com]

I hadn't come across that theory. Scary.
What I don't quite grok (but ok, I haven't got handy access to uTube) is quite why so many intelligent & tasteful people actually seem to go digging far enough to find these things on uTube... or why so many people pass on links for more borderline sick/funny or funny/ouch or funny/tasteless things so frequently.
Thanks for the link to the Long Spew Of Noise thing, though, that was an interesting read I'd not come across before either. :)

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I post comments on youtube pretty often, and I *hope* they're chock-full of information. Yesterday, I was looking at a segment of someone machining a V-8 engine out of a chunk of aluminum and saw a comment claiming that using a CNC machine wasn't a good way of doing a one-off engine block, compared to casting, and wrote 495 characters talking about how and why CNC is perfect for prototyping and casting is fairly terrible, especially for engine blocks. Most of my comments follow this general pattern. Yeah, it's mostly about noise, but if it's going to be mostly noise there's no reason to NOT add in some actual information. Someone might see it.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I'm glad somebody is making useful comments. (And, yeah, CNC makes tons more sense than casting for a one-off.) I'm mostly discouraged from ever even looking given the SNR, though.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

So, did anyone nominate those idiots for Darwin?