Find the most innocent, uncontroversial video on YouTube.
Scroll down ever so slightly, and you'll suddenly hear
a thousand furious [internet] voices yelling.
This video about puppies has sparked a heated investigation of 9/11.
YouTube isn't alone. Toxic comment sections are everywhere.
But some sites are better than others, reddit.com is full of thoughtful productive conversations.
So why does this box create such anger, and this one stimulates so much thought.
The explanation seems simple.
YouTube has a very wide audience.
Attracting enough trolls to ruin conversation for everyone. Reddit is much more isolated.
Each community united by a common interest. This theory isn't wrong, but it's incomplete.
If you're not quite sold, consider this,
by default Redditors are subscribed to a group of communities,
which because of this, are filled with large diverse audiences, like YouTube.
If audiences were the only factor, default Sub-Reddits would be as terrible as YouTube.
They are worse than the rest of Reddit,
but not nearly as bad as YouTube.
That difference between default Sub-Reddits and YouTube
can be attributed to differences on how the two systems work.
Comment boxes may look identical, but underneath our very different systems, which produce very different results.
YouTube isn't only anonymous, it's identity-less.
Each comment stands on its own attached to nothing, bringing out the worst in every commenter.
Redditors have an identity, a profile score and list of comments.
You are anonymous enough to be honest, but invested enough to be generally polite.
Good Reddit comments are up-voted,
which increases your score, called ''Karma'', like trophies Karma is completely useless.
But our brains are motivated just the same.
This system is far from perfect, but it does encourage people to make good posts.
Given that no one reads every comment, the order in which they appear is important.
The YouTube algorithm is super secret.
But a glance at an old video shows, that recent comments are shown first,
even above much higher quality ones.
Good comments disappear into the void.
Which also disincentivizes writing them in the first place.
Reddit shows higher-quality comments first, which does just the opposite.
Democratic information comes at a cost. People often up-vote what they want or assume to be true,
not what is. It's not uncommon for posts on the front page of Reddit to be completely wrong.
The top comment may totally debunk the post,
but enough people up-vote without ever checking the comments,
that it doesn't really matter. If this doesn't sound familiar,
You're probably one of those people.
YouTube makes this especially bad, by burying replies and making conversations so hard to follow,
that most of us only read parent comments.
YouTube Channels don't make money from comments.
So any time spent moderating them, is time wasted.
And because there are so many of them,
comments are usually either barely policed at all or completely disabled.
There is a report button,
but it's either completely useless or enough users think it is to have the same effect.
Reddit is full of Rules, Bots, Moderators and More Rules.
Prohibited comments are quickly removed and users quickly learn not to waste time posting them.
Think of all these factors as filters through which comments flow.
People have the same thoughts on both websites,
but different filters ultimately decide what comments people post.
It's obvious that YouTube is flawed, but it isn't clear why.
Big YouTubers have complained, quite vocally, for ages, but it's only gotten worse over time.
Twitter and Facebook are problematic too,
spreading false news and encouraging argument,
by forcing the most complex issues into a mere 140 characters.
If you were YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook, your only goal is keeping people on the site.
Everything else is secondary,
more time spent on YouTube is more ads watched, and more revenue earned.
Spreading accurate information would be nice, but it's just a bonus.
YouTube doesn't improve because there's no reason to.
They have all the numbers we don't and they've found what keeps people's interest.
When you have a Monopoly you maximize profits, and let people be as outraged as they'd like.
Facebook has no commitment to the truth.
If fake news stories are what keep your attention, so be it, in their minds, they're just providing what you demand.
Reddit also wants to sell ads, but their algorithm is why users come at all.
Their goals happen to be aligned with what we want.
It's easy to see YouTube, and Facebook, and Twitter as the bad guys.
But they themselves are also products of a much larger system.
And behind every bad situation, is a lousy system.
politicians are made corrupt by the system that created them.
And the problem with click-bait, stems from the constant struggle of journalists to put food on the table.
The design of a system is like a stamp, announcing exactly what it will produce
We should be outraged by the stamp itself, not at what it produces.
This video should teach you that
We can spend an eternity fixing everything that comes out of the machine we've built,
or we can fix the machine.
When it comes to YouTube, we can't change how the comment sections work.
But we can control the larger system, of which YouTube is a product of.
Remember, companies only care about one thing,
which also means they aren't attached to the way things are.
YouTube has zero loyalty to their design if it stops being profitable.
If you really care about making change, you need only move your resources,
and companies will follow.
Captions By: joshuaktanki
