I recently saw this on the front page of reddit, which made me think about how reddit’s opinion of the YouTube community has changed in the past year.
It used to be that reddit made fun of YouTube comments, and that the only YouTube comments that got any attention were the idiotic ones. (It was similar to how tumblr treats Yahoo Answers.)
But in the last few months, more and more excellent YouTube comments have been highlighted by the reddit community—so much so that reddit seems to have mostly abandoned their belief that YouTube is a place where uninformed people make uninformed comments.
Of course, the quality of discourse on YT still leaves a lot to be desired. But our experience in nerdfighteria has always been that you can have really interesting, productive, compassionate, and hilarious conversations on YouTube. Conventional wisdom is that online commenting sinks to the lowest common denominator, but my experience has been that if a community rewards certain kinds of comments—the funny ones, the generous ones, etc.—newcomers to that community tend to raise their game.
(Source: imgfave)
