this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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I only disagree with one thing on that: youtube is not a social media platform. It is horrible for discussions, topic discovery and organization, the comment sections and chat are worse than 4chan. It is a video diffusion platform, but not truly social media.
Which is sad, because it used to be a much more social platform. I used to run a small channel in 2007 and I'd get people messaging me, or adding me to friends (yes, that was a thing on YouTube).
Nothing can really be worse than 4chan. Youtube users are primed to say genuinely stupid things and enjoy reinforcing ignorance, while 4chan users have always had the primary goal of causing as much harm and destruction as possible including but not limited to suicides, poisonings, and proliferation of genocidal ideologies.
Ok, when I said worse, it was from this point of view: in some subchans, I've seen some smart conversations and advice there among the 95% neverending jungle of slurs (they probably see that as a feature, not a bug). In yt: never, the medium simply doesn't work to make people talk.
I've had a different experience. On 4chan there is a high degree of deliberate malice. On Youtube there is a lot of ignorance, but because of the extremely general audience of the platform it seems to me that it's more average people expressing their honest beliefs rather than trying to make your life worse because you entered their line of sight. I have learned through comments under my video essays and politic channels that many are willing to engage in conversation, even if it isn't always in good faith. I've had some interesting discourse over paragraphs at a time in a few cases.