YouTube comments (the original era)

» see youtube.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

youtube enabled comments in december 2005, shortly after the site launched. the comment system was simple: flat reverse-chronological list, no threading, no real moderation, anyone with a youtube account could comment on any video. it stayed approximately like this for eight years.

the youtube comment section in this period was famously bad. it was the standard reference for how bad internet comments could get. flame wars on every popular video. racism and homophobia. spam. arguments about religion under videos that had nothing to do with religion. trolls posting "first" on new uploads. bots posting fake giveaways. the entire reputation of "the internet comment section" as a poisoned space came partly from youtube's example.

on 6 november 2013 google forced a major change. comments would now require a google+ account. you would post under your real name (or your google+ display name). comments would be ranked algorithmically by "relevance" rather than chronologically. existing comments stayed but the new system was on by default for all video creators.

the change destroyed the original comment culture. some of what was destroyed was bad (the flame wars and harassment got harder when accountability arrived). some of what was destroyed was good (the running inside jokes, the chronological-sort culture, the chaotic-but-recognizable rhythm). modern youtube comments are calmer and more boring than they used to be.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

the youtube comment section from 2006 to 2013 had specific cultural patterns:

the "first" race. when a video was newly uploaded, commenters competed to be the first to post. "first comment!" "first!" "second :(" comments would pile up in the first few minutes after upload. it was a meaningless social game that consumed real time.

the inside-joke layer. popular videos developed their own comment cultures. specific phrases would get repeated. running jokes would persist for years. quoting song lyrics under music videos. quoting famous lines under movie clips. these inside jokes had recognizable evolution: a joke would start, get refined by other commenters, become a meme within that video's comment thread, then sometimes spread to other videos.

the flame war. almost every popular video developed political flame wars in its comments, regardless of topic. cooking videos had flame wars about religion. car review videos had flame wars about climate change. music videos had flame wars about the artist's politics. the flame wars were predictable and destructive.

the spam economy. there were entire businesses built on selling fake comments to youtube creators. you could buy 1000 comments for 5 dollars. the comments would be generic ("great video!" "thanks for sharing!"). the goal was to make videos look more popular and trigger youtube's recommendation algorithm.

~ the google+ change ~

google+ launched in june 2011 as google's facebook competitor. it never gained meaningful traction (see the google+ grave). google's response was to integrate google+ into other google products, including youtube. the goal was to drive google+ adoption by tying it to services people actually used.

on 6 november 2013 google rolled out the new comment system. existing users had to link their youtube account to a google+ account. comments now showed your google+ display name and profile picture. comments were ranked by an algorithm that prioritized "relevant" comments over chronologically recent ones.

the youtube creator community responded with fury. one of the platform's most popular creators, jawed karim (one of youtube's three co-founders, who had been mostly absent for years), broke his silence to post "why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?" on his original youtube channel. the post became one of the most-upvoted comments on youtube's own platform during the integration window. it was a public statement of how the existing community felt.

google made some accommodations. they unlinked google+ from youtube partially over the next two years. by 2015 you could comment with a youtube-only account again. but the original chronological-sort comment culture was gone. the new ranking algorithm stayed. the modern youtube comment section dates from this period and is qualitatively different from the pre-2013 one.

~ what we lost ~

the inside jokes. specific videos had specific comment cultures. these cultures developed over years. the algorithmic ranking introduced after 2013 buried older comments and surfaced "relevant" recent ones. the running gags from 2009 in the comments of a 2008 video are still there if you scroll, but they are no longer at the top, and they no longer get added to.

the chronological flow. before 2013, you could go to a video and see the most recent comments. you could watch comment threads happen in real time on popular videos. that experience is mostly gone. modern youtube shows "top comments" first, which are usually older comments that have accumulated upvotes. real-time comment culture has migrated to twitch and live streams.

the worst-case examples. youtube comments were a real cultural reference point for "how bad can internet conversation get." they were so famously bad that academic papers were written about them. the internet's collective memory of "comment section toxicity" was largely calibrated against youtube. modern comment sections are calmer, but the standard reference for comment-section dysfunction is harder to point at, because youtube is no longer it.

the case study in monoculture risk. youtube comments showed what happens when one platform owns a content medium and lets the comment section run mostly without intervention for eight years. the result was a specific kind of cultural decay. modern platforms moderate more aggressively partly because they learned from watching youtube. the specific kind of chaos youtube comments produced is not coming back.

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