The internet was probably never a net pleasant or edifying place. For most of its life, the web has been a repository for maladjusted losers and the collective id, a ceaseless stream-of-consciousness delivered by mass humanity at its most gormless and banal. But even this was better than today’s miasmic iteration: littered with the mutant products of self-cannibalizing AI, bent by the pressure of monetizable engagement into a frightening chimera that combines the vices of the cynic with the diseases of the madman. The internet is exhausted, and it is exhausting.
But even in the current toxic wasteland, there is still at least one good place: the YouTube comments section.
I’m not saying that YouTube itself is the last beautiful place left on the internet. YouTube the platform is filled with debased shock jocks, febrile talking heads, and Lovecraftian children’s entertainment. But despite the creepy little algorithms that keep you never more than three clicks away from a Jordan Peterson video, YouTube is also a place where people post videos—often music videos—that they enjoy. And underneath the videos, people congregate to talk about them. They really talk. They don’t post, they don’t discourse, they don’t troll, they don’t hawk or promote, they don’t triangulate or position. They just talk, about human things.
They share memories. Underneath Mary O’Hara’s angelic “Óró Mo Bháidín,” someone writes:
My mother, Mary Teresa Murphy from Thomas Street in Dublin used to sing me to sleep with this song in Gaeling (circa 1960). She was a lovely Mammy!
They honor the dead. Half the comments on George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” are tributes:
MY DADDYS SONG TO MY MOMMA ..I LOST MY DADDY IN 2012 MOMMA THIS JANUARY 10TH ..THEY’RE TOGETHER IN HEAVEN NOW WITH JESUS…MARRIED 62 YEARS ..
My dad played this song on his Martin. What I would give to go back 4 weeks. He died Friday nite. Sad
My father was killed on the job in 1980 when I was 6, the youngest of 6. I woke up early one morning and heard this song playing quietly. My mother was crying, listening to it.😢
They tell stories. Buried in the comments of “Big Iron” is a close encounter with the singer, Marty Robbins:
My daddy and I used to get drunk and listen to so many songs, and this was one of many. He was born in ‘52, and he went to the Texas State Fair as a young boy.. his parents sent him to concessions with what was surely a single dollar… as he was waiting in line, he noticed the tall, slim cowboy standing in front of him. As he drank this visage in, he realized he had a rhinestone belt on that read “ROBBINS” all in rhinestone. He knew right off it was Marty and got so overwhelmed he just ran away- shackles, yet full of joy.
They talk about their homes. Sometimes, the train of thought is obvious, as with Iris DeMent’s “Our Town”:
Love this song but it’s bittersweet as I grew up in rural Nebraska and sadly my town might not even exist when I’m old. When I was young we had a church and a bar and a few small businesses but now it’s just a church and that will go soon as we share a priest with other towns and soon there will be nothing left, and so I’ve said goodbye. I’ll keep the good memories though.
But any song tied to a specific place—“Atlantic City,” for example—inevitably brings locals out of the woodwork to deliver exclamation-studded and sometimes incongruously chipper declarations of allegiance.
Born in River Vale New Jersey in 1955. Went to grade school with Bill Maher. Moved to Freehold New Jersey in 1969. Bruce, Bars and House Parties. What a blast! Lucky to still be alive
Left Jersey in 1985 because the invasion of New Yorkers. Jersey’s a great state to say you came from!!
Even more local: The comments section under Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” is currently dominated by a hundred more or less inventive variations of “FLY EAGLES FLY.”
You could argue that I have stacked the deck by highlighting classics; that all this is strictly due to George Jones’ superior talent, and nothing to the YouTube comments section itself. But in fact, these conversations take place underneath music of all qualities and genres: from early 2000s pop-punk anthems to movie soundtracks to minor ‘80s hair bands. They also take place under the auspices of entirely different forms: sketch comedy, home improvement how-to videos, clips from long-cancelled shows.
People talking is what makes YouTube beautiful. People talking is what makes the rest of the internet unbearable. What is the difference?
Perhaps it’s that in the YouTube comments section, the internet remains firmly subordinate to life outside it: a vessel for connecting online individuals who nevertheless remain anchored in their own realities, rather than an organism with a life of its own and an emergent drive to assimilate all others. The rest of the internet is always seeping outward, transforming the world into a parody of its own parodic grotesque. Incel, tradwife, lolcow, skibidi toilet: there is no fragment of nightmare gibberish (many of which first spawned on YouTube) that you can expect to stay safely contained. “Doge” is now a government agency. People watch viral cooking videos while they eat and line up for viral dishes at viral restaurants; they sit side by side texting each other memes; they film themselves crying and they film themselves slow dancing with their spouses in the kitchen (and this is the wholesome part of the internet).
But in the YouTube comments section specifically, the early promise of the internet lives on. The miracle of the world wide web brings people together, making independent human life and activity more expansive by virtue of being communicated and not collapsing them to a single shrill, unvaried squeal: Content! Content! Content!
Perhaps the squeal—despite the Mr. Beasts, the Jordan Petersons, and the Cocomelons–has not yet entirely taken over because YouTube, one of the earliest Big Websites that created the internet as we now know it, is a kind of online museum of life before online. Many of the cultural artifacts on display hail from a time when the internet was less dominant—either in the culture, or in the life of some particular millennial. People are drawn by a powerful nostalgia to watch and comment—an urge that perhaps generates the comment section’s gentle permeating sadness. People watch what they think they’ve lost, and which they have lost, until and unless they pick up a guitar. Still, it’s much better than nothing.
Or perhaps the resistance to the squeal is due to the simple presence of the music and other works of art that still comprise a significant part of YouTube’s raison d’etre. Youtube commenters have a common object, a discrete compound of talent and competence produced by human minds and hands, to discuss. In the YouTube comments section, everyone’s a critic, in the best sense of the word. They execute judgement on the merits of a given piece and reflect on its place in the larger cultural ecosystem. They tease out the individual elements that contribute to the effect of the whole—noting exactly when the drums kick in, penning accolades for the bassist or songwriter or producer, sharing bits of lore. They explore and communicate that most ineffable and incommunicable aspect of a song: how it makes them feel, not just in terms of sensation, but in terms of memory, hope, longing, images in dreams. They write about how a song speaks to their heart.
Even when a particular comments section does host that specially demented breed of conversation peculiar to the internet, there is something more winsome about it. There are the maudlin omni-nationalists from Turkey, or Albania, or Bosnia, who populate Wolfe Tones and the playlists of similar artists with overtures to like-minded folk abroad (much love from Turkey my Irish brothers, never give up the fight for freedom). There are the guys discussing the inimitable Georgian folk song “Gandagana,” just short of the cusp of Getting Something that, once Got, will change their whole lives:
Lol i thought this song is like that badass war song but then i read the lyrics it just about love
Hahaha same here, I’ve been singing this since more than a year thinking it was a warrior song, then the guy is like: I am melting like butter lol…
Above all, the YouTube comments section is characterized by a sense of solidarity, a sense that we have all found ourselves here together in this space, impelled by common affections directed at our common or differing objects, enjoying familiar sweetnesses and discovering new ones—but always with a touch of melancholy. It’s the melancholy of those laboring under the yoke of time. We are all here, watching the songs of our different youths become dated irrelevance or ossified canon, returning again and again to the same videos, watching the little “Posted 4 months ago” tag become a year, then two, then five, then ten.
Sometimes the commentariat’s preoccupation with time is triumphant, as with this catalogue of the perennial excellence of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”:
2008: This song is perfect
2009: This song is perfect
2010: This song is perfect
2011: This song is perfect
2012: This song is perfect
2013: This song is perfect
2014: This song is perfect
2015: This song is perfect
2016: This song is perfect
2017: This song is perfect
2018: This song is perfect
2019: This song is perfect
2020: This song is perfect
2021: This song is perfect
2022: This song is perfect
2023: This song is perfect
2024: This song is perfect
2025: This song is perfect
But more often it is a kind of cry in the dark: Anyone here in January 2025? Anyone here in July 2017? Anyone here from the Northern Exposure finale? Anyone here from the Passion Pit sample? Anyone here?
Is anyone here with me? is a lonely thing to cry out—frightening, even. But if we are all laboring in melancholy under the yoke of time, at least in the YouTube comments section we are yoked together. This is the magic of the comments: seeing that across time, across space, on some Monday in April 2013, someone named BigDaddyDonutEater was looking at what you are looking at, feeling what you are feeling, and putting it into his own words.
You can reach across time and space and the differences between you and BigDaddyDonutEater (mutatis mutandi) and find that there is, after all, someone on the other end of the line. You can leave a comment on a comment, and find that people will in turn leave their comments on your comment.
This opening to a short essay in the comments of Enya’s “Anywhere Is” generated thirteen comments in its turn:
Right now, there are people all over the world who are just like you. They’re either lonely, they’re missing somebody, they’re depressed, they’re hurt, they’re scarred from the past, they’re having personal issues no one knows about, they have secrets you wouldn’t believe. They wish, they dream and they hope. And right now, they are sitting here reading these words, and I’m writing this for you so you don’t feel alone anymore. Always remember, don’t be depressed about the past, don’t worry about the future, and just focus on today.
“Wonderful comment,” one user responds. “Thanks so much.”
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