YouTube Comments (the original)

~ here lie the youtube comments ~

YouTube launched in February 2005. The comments section was added shortly after, and by 2006 was integral to how YouTube videos were experienced. For about seven years, YouTube comments were a particular cultural phenomenon: notoriously chaotic, racist in spots, weird, occasionally hilarious, often cruel, and sometimes, sometimes producing the strangest, funniest, most real commentary on the internet.

On November 6, 2013, Google merged YouTube comments with Google+, requiring users to comment using their Google+ profiles. The integration was disastrous (covered separately in the Google+ memorial). After two years of revolt, Google partially reversed the decision in 2015. But the YouTube comments section that emerged was a different thing, moderated more aggressively, threaded differently, attached to real names rather than anonymous YouTube handles. The pre-2013 cultural moment was over.

~ the genres of YouTube comment ~

A specific taxonomy of pre-2013 YouTube comment genres developed organically:

• "first.". The single most common comment type. Users raced to be the first to comment on a new video. The reward was social capital. "first." was usually downvoted to oblivion by people who saw it later but the original commenter had already received their micro-fame moment. By 2010 commenting "first" had become so cliché it was ironic. By 2012 ironic "first" comments had become cliché in turn.
• The lyric chain. Music videos accumulated comments that quoted song lyrics in chronological order. By the time a popular song's comments had thousands of entries, you could read the song by scrolling top to bottom. Some lyric chains went on for tens of thousands of replies, with users adding the next line of the song. The phenomenon was a form of folk poetry archive.
• The "watching in [year]" reply. Years after a video was uploaded, viewers would comment "anyone watching in 2018?" These comments would themselves accumulate replies from people watching in next years. Some popular videos had stratified comment archaeology going back a decade, where you could see different generations of commenters arriving at the same content.
• The "I've watched this 47 times" comment. A specific genre on songs and emotional videos. Users disclosed how many times they had rewatched something. The comments often had higher upvote-to-downvote ratios than substantive comments. They were, public confessions of compulsive viewing.
• The argument cascade. A comment would express an opinion. A reply would disagree. The replies-to-the-reply would intensify. By 50 levels deep the conversation had migrated entirely from the video's actual content to a heated debate about, e.g. whether quantum mechanics was deterministic. These cascades were one of the few places on the early internet where strangers argued with each other for hours.
• The tutorial-comment. When a video showed a technique (cooking, music, software), comments would extend the tutorial: "you can also do X to make it taste better," "if you switch to Y the rendering is faster." These comments became, in aggregate, an unmoderated supplementary tutorial system. Many people learned skills as much from YouTube comments as from the videos.
• The conspiracy reply. Almost any video could spawn comments connecting the content to a conspiracy theory. "did anyone notice the freemason symbol at 2:34?" "that's why they don't want us to know about [X]." YouTube comments were, by 2010, one of the dominant breeding grounds for conspiracy thinking online. The pre-2013 comments section was, in this sense, a dangerous cultural artefact.

~ the racism problem ~

The pre-2013 YouTube comments were also, frankly, racist. Anonymous handles, no real-name attachment, minimal moderation: the result was that any video with a non-white person, a woman, a gay person, or a controversial topic accumulated openly racist, sexist, and homophobic commentary at a rate that other platforms had partially controlled, because the comments section was widely understood to be a worst-of-the-internet location.

Many YouTube creators in the 2010-2013 era explicitly disabled comments on their videos. Others used moderation extensions to hide racist replies, though the comments section's reputation as toxic was widespread, and Google's eventual Google+ integration was framed (publicly) as a try to address it, "real names will improve civility."

~ the google+ unification ~

On November 6, 2013, Google forced YouTube users to attach their accounts to Google+ in order to comment. The integration was meant to "improve comment quality" by tying comments to real identities. The implementation was botched (commenting was buggy for weeks), the social response was hostile (top YouTubers made angry videos, a petition reached 240,000 signatures, the hashtag #YouTubeComments trended for weeks).

The Google+ integration changed YouTube comments. The pre-2013 chaotic, anonymous, occasionally beautiful, frequently awful culture was replaced with a more sterile, real-name-attached, threaded discussion model. The new comments section was probably better in net moral terms (less open racism, more accountability) but it was a different thing culturally. The "first" comments largely disappeared. The lyric chains thinned. The conspiracy replies migrated to dedicated platforms, which is why the argument cascades went to Twitter.

Google partially rolled back the Google+ integration in 2015, after two years of user complaints. But the unwound integration was not a return to 2012 YouTube comments. It was a new third thing; YouTube comments with Google identity attached but no longer requiring Google+ specifically; the old culture had been broken in 2013 and did not reassemble.

~ the hole it left ~

The chaotic public commons. YouTube comments before 2013 were one of the few large-scale unmoderated public spaces where strangers could shout at each other about any topic. The shouting was often awful. It was also, for a particular kind of internet culture, the actual culture. Cleared of which, the world became more polite and less interesting.

The anonymous lurker's voice. YouTube before 2013 allowed anonymous commenting more permissively than most platforms. People who would never speak under their real names contributed to the discourse. Some of those voices were vile. Some were brave. The post-2013 architecture has discouraged both. The trade-off is real.

The lyric chain as a folk artefact. Modern platforms have algorithmically-sorted comments and threading systems that destroy chronological-by-scroll ordering. The pre-2013 lyric chain. Thousands of users completing a song line by line; cannot exist on current YouTube architecture. It is gone.

~ epitaphs ~

"in 2010 i scrolled through 4,000 comments on a daft punk song. by the time i reached the bottom of the comments i had read the song's lyrics in chronological reply form. it took an hour. it was the most internet thing i have ever done.". m.k. 35

"my username on youtube before 2013 was xXdragonkillerXx99. i made 1,400 comments under that name. i now have a real name attached to my google account. those comments are still attached to a username i no longer use. they are an archaeological layer of who i was at 14.", e.b. 31

"i learned to argue on youtube comments between 2009 and 2013. i argued with strangers about quantum mechanics, climate change, the harlem shake, and whether kanye was actually good. those arguments shaped how i think. they were also probably bad for me. i miss them.", a.r. 36