24
votes
YouTube breeds sociopaths and monsters. Not through audience’s demands but how the platform itself is designed.
Link information
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- Title
- YouTube breeds sociopaths & monsters. - Daniel Sobey-Harker - Medium
- Authors
- Daniel Sobey-Harker
- Published
- Jan 22 2018
- Word count
- 6946 words
If you're an idiot like me, don't click the waybackmachine link in the article, it'll redirect you to a bunch of spam pages. Go to https://archive.org/web/ instead.
I am so fucking glad Vine is dead. That site/app/whatever was the most toxic place on the internet, I'd say worse than 4chan. Everything about it appealed exclusively to people under 18 and it quickly devolved into a contest of "who can do the edgiest, most harmful thing to get views" aka "do it for the vine LOLOLOL XD XD XD"
There's a reason let's plays aren't as popular anymore. Every gamer with common sense knows that the youtube platform isn't friendly towards their content anymore. I know some streamers who upload their VODs to youtube but it's largely becoming the case that if you aren't already big on yt, now's not a good start.
I have bad news for you. TikTok is insanely popular, and is, ostensibly, the new Vine.
I've only seen their ads on YouTube and I despise those. It's child exploitation and it's gross. I can only guess what the actual platform is like, seeing they're making public ads on YouTube from half-naked teenagers' dancing w/ erotic undertones. This guy talks about it.
Technology is just an amplifier of human behaviour and it's shocking, and absolutely fucked that techies (including myself) forget this. We can design amazing new systems but somehow we forget to take into account that humanity has terrible behaviours and habits that can ruin a lot of good tech.
Check out www.thejournal.ie , it's an Irish news site. The comments section is a total fucking cesspool, as bad or worse than youtube. I have myself succumb to hate filled retaliatory posts there in the distant past. Eventually the site bred so much venom in me I just stopped using it. It's bloody terrible. I still occasionally read stuff from there, but try to avoid the comments section.
Recently however, I dared to comment to correct a severely incorrect point someone else had made, and discovered that they have modified the webpage to analyze your comment as you type and tell you on a scale of one to ten how likely your comment is likely to be perceived as toxic, it's a really clever and innovative idea. On getting a 6/10 for my comment I immediately revised it until I got it down to 2/10. It read much better and I felt much better about posting it. I think it's an ingenious concept, it makes you stop and think more about what you are writing. Very clever stuff.
Edit: fixed the URL
Where is this? I just tried checking out The Journal’s page and it looks like their comments section is just a stock implementation of Disqus?
Indeed I did.
Sorry, wrong website, www.thejournal.ie
Interesting. I just posted a response to someone (in an article about Trump, so I'm sure I will regret it) to test it out, but didn't see anything. I guess it must be getting screened out by a content blocker I'm running.
Here ya go: https://ibb.co/xDBpM2B
That is pretty cool. I can see it pushing discussions on contentious topics towards being anodyne and content-less, but I guess that's preferable to being rude and full up with bullshit.
I don't think that's the case at all. If you can't get your point across without being rude or trying to rile up the person you're arguing with then you probably need to look more at the point you're trying to make.
Also remember that this functionality doesn't stop you posting your toxic shit, it just highlights that it might be perceived as toxic, in which case any reasonable person who just got caught up in the moment would take a second look before posting. I like it.
Maybe. I looked at the Google Perspectives platform they're using and it has some samples. It looks like they trained their machine learning on people's appraisals of toxicity on sample comments, so the toxicity barometer is only as good as the reference points they're using. The politics comments, in particular, seem to be getting stripped of actual opinions or content. It's a touchy topic to be sure, since some opinions are inherently toxic, so it's hard to say.
You are right that it doesn't stop you from posting toxic stuff. But there is the concern about whether you'd rather have people saying toxic and horrible things politely versus saying good things rudely.
That's a fair point alright, but from my brief experience using it I found it beneficial to me when writing, I thought more about the point I was making instead of trying to have a dig at the person (even though I didn't realise that's what I was doing) just because they were wrong, and rude about it. I was less aggravated by the end of it. I don't think it affected the point I was trying to make.
I suppose it had a similar effect as discussing things in public would. I'd be fairly certain the majority of people wouldn't talk in public, in the real world the way they do on some of these toxic forums.
I suppose that's the human nature question at the heart of the issue. Are these people being assholes out of a lack of empathy for who they're talking to because of how impersonal online communication is? Or are they being assholes because the distance frees them from fear of being punched in the face/ostracized for behaving like jerks?
When I phrase it that way, I guess downvote systems are functionally the "punched in the face" approach and we can see from sites like Reddit that they don't work super well. Maybe the "Hey, try and remember that this is a person with feelings you're talking to" approach will work better.
I remember a Nemi comic strip where she complains about how her car horn lets her express anger at other people on the road, but there isn't much of a clear signal to communicate "good on 'ya mate" with any clarity. I wonder how much discourse on sites like that could be improved if you just gave people an option to say something like "+1: I disagree with you, but this was well stated." Options to express approval of good behavior as much as disapproval could probably condition people to be less primed for hostility.
I'm surprised that there are people with such distaste towards vine. I never used the app but people I knew did. I see no harm in letting people make stupid videos to share with friends (followers). Sure, documentaries are not created with the format but not everything has to be that type of content. I disagree with it being a "who can be the edgiest". I've seen plenty of vines that are just family friendly type of humor. Even if that's not the case, are the <18 crowd not allowed to have their own type of humor?
I find it pretentious to look down on Vine because of your reasoning. I'm sure there were people who looked down on literally every topic you've ever liked as well. If there's no harm- what's the issue? Allow people to express themselves however they'd like even if you happen to find it annoying. After all, no one is forcing you to consume that type of content.
Can one even efficiently monetise videos at all? I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations a few months back, and the price of the traffic alone would require all viewers to pay a ~$2 subscription fee. That is not including the money for other infrastructure, staff, and paying the creators themselves. Even if you can somehow make it 10 times more efficient (or I am one order of magnitude wrong, which is a possibility), we're still talking some form of subscription fee if you want to make profit. And that's not something 78 million nine-year-olds (or rather their parents) will probably pay. The free-with-advertising model has corrupted a lot of people into thinking that there is such thing as a free meal.