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YouTube is scary
Dec. 22nd, 2007 12:06 amI'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.
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.
