}

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

YouTube Comment Reconstruction - Finale


This is the final “YouTube Comment Reconstruction”, and since I shared the first one, I figured I should share the last one. It’s been a fun ride.

The series has been brilliant in many ways, but for me one of the main things was calling attention to the inanity and the downright viciousness of the comments on YouTube. I routinely avoid them because they’re so awful nearly all the time. For example, and especially, I’ve not seen such pervasive homophobia and even rank hatred of LGBT people in any other place.

I decided to have a look at the comments for this video, though, and among the appreciative, straightforward (so to speak) comments, there were also some that kind of lived up to expectation. Someone left a clearly joking comment about the “blood” not being red, and that got the same sort of responses that this series reconstructed, namely, genuine, hostile responses to what was, in essence, a trolling comment. Yeah a sense of irony is not the greatest strength of YouTube commenters.

These videos made such aggressive and ignorant comments, well, fun. And entertaining, too. Dead Parrot, the comedy folks who made these videos, said in the comments to this video:
Just to clear up a few things, we're coming to an end with the YouTube Comment Reconstruction series because we feel like we've done everything we can with it for the time being. All the same people are still onboard and looking to work together on a new Dead Parrot series soon (including Eryl and Graham), we just thought it better to finish this series on a high rather than milk it and keep making them until they're not funny (which would have been the easier option).

We'll still be uploading comedy content on the channel, supercuts, full episodes of comedy shows and new Dead Parrot originals. Who knows YTCR might return in the future but for the time being we thought we'd round off the show with a nice message about not being a dick on the internet.
And it was a good send-off—and the final line is perfect.

Also, don’t be a dick on the Internet.

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