No Place To Hide

For years I maintained that the unofficial slogan for the internet should have been, "Every answer you could ever want... Just, please, don't read the comments." By now everyone knows the comment section of your average internet site is useless - filled with homophobic or racist comments as well as conspiracy theories even your senile grandparents wouldn't believe. Of course the only saving grace about these comments is that they were so poorly worded and spelled that most of the time you couldn't really be sure who they were trying to insult. It was the worst of humanity on display for all to see and it was like this because of the anonymous nature of most commenting formats. All you had to do was leave an email address which would not be made public and you could unleash whatever pent up anger was inside of you, totally free of any repercussions. But in the last year we have finally seen a tipping point. Slowly but surely websites have begun to do away with anonymous commenting on stories, requiring you to link your comments to your Facebook page, putting your face and actual name alongside your comments (apparently they don't think those of us without Facebook pages have anything interesting to say). While not a perfect system it is still better than nothing and many sites saw the number of crazy or nonsensical comments begin to drop off. It must be going pretty well because one of the biggest sites for terrible comments is falling in line, as this afternoon YouTube announced it will be getting rid of anonymous comments.

For reason I can't explain, YouTube has some of the worst commenters across the entire internet as 90% of them were negative and filled with hate. Obviously you are always going to find at least one person who doesn't like something about a video, the problem is that no one on that site appears to understand the art of the appropriate response. They either love the video more than the home movie of the day the brought their child home or hate it as if it was Nazi propaganda and if anyone had the gall to disagree with their stance it meant they should die in a fire. If that wasn't bad enough, what always drove me crazy about YouTube comments is that they very rarely have anything to do with the video in question. It didn't matter how innocent the video in question was, the comments beneath it were always the same: the first person would like it, the second would hate it with the fire of a thousands suns, the third would say something homophobic, the fourth person would say "First" (because apparently being the first to comment on a video is a badge of honor), the fifth would blame Obama, the sixth would try and reason with the second person, who would invariable come back with yet another homophobic comment, the seventh would tell us all to find God and the eighth person would like everyone reading to know about an awesome work from home opportunity they recently came across, then the pattern would repeat depending on how long the video had been posted. You know, writing it out like that the question becomes less about why YouTube would see a need to re-work its commenting policy and more about why they waited so long to do so.

Now because this is the internet there are people are complaining about the change, saying it is an issue of free speech and arguing that the First Amendment gives them the right to say anything they want, regardless of whether or not you agree with it. Obviously, these people are idiots because no one is saying they can't still spew their hate-speak, only that they will now be held accountable for it. There is nothing in the Constitution about being able to maintain privacy while threatening to murder a person simply because they don't agree with you that Dane Cook is the best comedian alive today. And if you don't want people to know this is how you feel about an issue I would contend that is because you know you are in the wrong. It's an interesting way to weed out the fakers in the crowd as the people who really believe strongly in their position don't hide who they are. Besides, there is nothing which says the Facebook account linked to YouTube has to be real. Social media experts have estimated that there are tens of millions of "burner" Facebook accounts created by spammers and con-artists to either build up a legitimate business or just mess with other civilians. Unfortunately there is nothing which can be done about that, which is why there is nothing stopping any of these commenters from creating a fake account and continuing to do what they do. I think YouTube and other websites which have engaged in this new commenting system are just hoping that these kind of people are too lazy to go through all that work just to leave a comment designed to get a reaction out of one or two people. I would like to think those sites are right, but that also assumes these anonymous users have better things to do with their time, which they clearly do not.

Some have said this will cause them to leave YouTube forever but the problem for them is that they really don't have an alternative if they still want to watch videos. Sure, there are a few other video sites, but nothing can rival YouTube's library. This is what happens when the only game in town decides to change the rules - you either follow along or you simply don't get to play. (I also think many of these people feel as though they are infamous and are in for one hell of a shock when no one notices they are gone.) Besides, for all the belly-aching and threats to never use YouTube again I actually think these internet trolls are relieved. I don't care how much pleasure they get from that moment when a person is gullible enough to fall for one of their provocative comments, at some point these trolls have to get tired of repeating the same old shtick. It's human nature to get tired of repetition, which is why even famous insult comedians occasionally want to take the night off and just tell some standard jokes. As I said these comments had fallen into a predictable pattern, so by now I have to figure these faceless people working behind the scenes without actually getting any recognition for what they think is a brilliant joke are annoyed with having to keep it up. If anything, they should be happy these websites have developed a new commenting system because it will force them to come up and with new and even more interesting ways to insult random strangers or denigrate an entire race of people. And if they aren't clever enough to manage that, well, there is always Reddit.