My YouTube rant

[greg]

I really do not like the way YouTube recommends videos now. It's like it's geared at creating viral videos. "Oh, this video of women falling down and showing their panties is getting a lot of views. Let's recommend this to everyone, especially people searching for gardening advice or Chinese archaeology." The net result is that many videos are being marketed to the wrong crowd. I'm getting some of my videos, such as the one I made about our Japanese apartment, being promoted to people who would otherwise never watch such a video. So they click on it, the lifeless, pathetic morons that they are who have nothing better to do with their lives than to randomly click on videos and watch them, and then I have to delete their trolling comments. That apartment video now has over 26,000 views, and it really shouldn't have more than a couple thousand at most. So because it has so many views, it shows up on the recommended list to some moron who just watched a video of some girl's boobs bouncing in slow motion and making some dumb comment on that about fapping, or some dumb video about how intelligent Atheists are and they post some comment about how all religious people are morons. "Hey, here's a video about a Japanese apartment. I think I can point to Japan on the map. I think I'll go check out that video and accuse this guy of being a homosexual, even though his wife and kid are in the video." It starts snowballing.

It used to be that when you would watch a video about something like ligers (they actually do exist, and unfortunately their fate is worse than just being bred for magic), on the righthand side of the screen would be a list of video recommendations, which would all be either about ligers or other animal hybrids. Now the first on top is the video about news anchor fails with the thumbnail of an anchorwoman with huge cleavage who doesn't even show up in the video at all (yes, I watched it...). YouTube used to be coherent. Now it's seems to focus more on just random video viewing.

[usamimi]

Yeah, I noticed that, too. It's really annoying. I keep getting really weird video recommendations all the time now and it's really off-putting. :/

[Animusubi]

Yeah I also find it annoying. ESPECIALLY if you use the PS3 Youtube app (which in itself is one of the most annoying apps on the PS3). On the PS3, it doesn't even show all of the people you're subscribed to unless they are really active. The search function is tedious and annoying to use. The recommendations are ALWAYS off base. I swear I'll watch maybe 10 different Ranma 1/2 videos but if I watch 1 martial arts video, then it starts recommending me only martial arts videos not even related to the one I watched. Say I watch Jackie Chan, and then it starts giving me recommendations for UFC matches...>:C Very stupid.

[danth]

I think Google has jumped the shark in general. But yeah, I too get the most stupid video recommendations now. If I watch a video, forever after that video or others like it will be recommended to me, even if the current video I'm watching has nothing to do with it. I much prefer the old "related videos" feature.

[greg]

You're right. Google became big because of its accuracy. That's why I started using it 12 years or so ago. Bing sucks, so I try to use Altavista more often (maybe I should try Lycos too).

They switched from "related videos" to "recommended videos" rather sneakily. Since both words start with the letter "r", I didn't notice it at first until it started annoying me. It is especially becoming a pain to me, because now I have to babysit the halfwits of the Internet. I've been trolled by four retards this past week. One idiot on my video of Japan's suicide forest kept accusing me of being gay. I made the mistake of pointing out his lack of intelligence and how he has the burden of proof of proving that he's older than 14. I ended up blocking him, but this prompted some other imbecile, so I had to block him, too. I imagine that these idiots would not have discovered the video if it weren't for YouTube's absurd recommended videos feature.

So apparently the number of views contribute to videos being recommended. I think another factor is the number of subscribers one accumulates. I am at nearly 800 subscribers now, and I don't really understand why. I think at least a handful of subscribers are actually bots or something. It's like how after I created a Twitter account, I suddenly had these supposed people following me for no good reason. I could be tweeting about belly button lint found each day for all anyone cares. It must be marketing or something, but I fail to see what the benefit from that would be. At first, I didn't doubt that those who subscribed to my YT account were actual people. Now, I am not so sure. At least there has been a sharp decline in those stupid "sub 4 sub" spam messages I used to get. As if I need non-existent subscribers to help boost my deflated ego or something.

[davemerrill]

I have no proof, but I'm convinced that YouTube commenters are actual troll-like devolved creatures that live in caves, and only communicate with the outside world via YouTube comments. Seriously, there's some ugly stuff there.

Whenever I post a Twitter that mentions some kind of marketable topic or property, like real estate or Star Wars, I notice that I get two or three bots following me. They go away after a few days, generally.

[greg]

Yeah, I wonder what sort of valuable information those dumb bots plan to collect? It doesn't make sense.

YouTube trolls are seriously subhuman scum. Like when the 3/11 earthquake happened ant the tsunami destroyed Sendai, these people would comment on those videos "Good, it serves them right for bombing Pearl Harbor." We won the war, so what are they so upset about? You'd think that Japan dropped a couple of atomic bombs on Americans and melted their skin off, by the way they post their unfounded racist hatred.

It gets really tiring babysitting the Internet sometimes. I think that at least for a couple of my videos, I will use the setting to prompt me for approval before the comments are posted.

Normal, well-adjusted humans have the innate desire to get along with others and to have others like them. Somehow, there is some short circuit in the brains of these imbecillic knuckle-draggers and they instead desire to piss everyone off. I've made some videos of my anime/videogame/plastic model collections and such by doing a tour of my hobby room/nerd cave/otaku room, and every once in a while I get some drone who accuses me of being a 40 year old virgin who lives with my parents an who will "never get laid." Anybody who thinks that having sex is a life accomplishment is doomed to be a pitiful soul. It doesn't matter if I'm married or I have a kid. They just assume all anime fans are slobbering, fat shut-ins. I have anime posters and action figures pinned to the wall, and they're accusing me of being immature? Yikes.

[usamimi]

Yeah, living in Texas, I heard A LOT of "Oh, well, they're just getting what they deserved from God!" when the quake/tsunami hit. I seriously couldn't believe that. I rarely look at Youtube comments simply because most of the time it's bullcrap like that.

[davemerrill]

I have comments on my Let's Anime blog moderator-approved; mostly to catch the spam, but with everything else out there, there's an element of anonymous fuckery that seems to come out of nowhere, just to try and make somebody's day a little less pleasant.

I think there was a learning curve for a lot of message boards and websites in dealing with unwanted comments. The AWA board went un-moderated for a few years, and then things got ugly and spammy, and the convention had to take a real hard line and tighten the rules up. As a result the board regained its focus. The Comics Journal eliminated their message board entirely, and that was probably for the best.

I've never posted or participated in comments on YouTube, but it seems to really attract the lowest common denominator. I'd advise anybody posting anything ever to YT to set their comments to "moderated" only.

[greg]

A day or two ago, I set the few problem videos to publish comments only after my approval. The majority of my videos don't really attract a ton of people, especially the ones involving driving around the Japanese countryside, or videos of me putting together a plastic model. Even the plastic model videos that have viewership in the tens of thousands don't really get much crappy comments. Going forward, I may set up "comments pending approval" to be the default for all my videos.

I've learned my lesson not to respond by pointing out their immaturity and hypocrisy and such. They thrive on conflict. Just delete and instantly block the user from the channel.