It's sometimes a little frightening to read the comments on a YouTube video. Let's say you've just watched a cat video and want to find out how others responded to that moment when one kitten massaged another. You scroll down and find ... a large helping of inanity as well as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and pure nonsense. It's well known that the YouTube comments section is a virtual septic tank. In the immortal words of BuzzFeed: 'YouTube IS the room with the million monkeys and the million typewriters.'
Now Google, which runs YouTube, has decided to clean up the site. It's rolling out new moderation tools for video up-loaders and channel owners, enabling them to review comments before they're posted. It's requiring would-be commenters to sign up for a Google + account - a matter of some controversy. And instead of showing the most recent comment first, it will rank comments according to 'relevance,' by considering up-votes, a commenter's reputation, and whether or not the commenter is a member of one's Google+ social network. These steps should encourage more civilized discourse. But I'll miss the old regime. As news sites and e-commerce sites moved to tidy up their comments sections - The Times has long had a strict moderation policy - there was (some modicum of) value in YouTube remaining a portal to chaos.
The comments, for now, are human, even if all too human. They counterbalance the shiny, happy videos of screaming goats and laughing babies. Sure, they'll make your stomach turn, but isn't it beneficial to feel that way from time to time? There's something useful in reminding oneself that under the cleanest streets of the fanciest neighborhoods, there's a sewer.
Soon YouTube comments will be less obscene, more decorous and quite possibly more substantive. They'll also be less revealing.
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