Sunday 18 December 2011

5 Things About YouTube Culture That Anger Me


  1. Copy and paste comments. “If you do not c&p this to x amount of videos within y hours/minutes/genericunitoftime, some COSMIC HORROR will end your life in a humiliating and probably distasteful way!!! SAVE YOURSELF YOU GULLIBLE YOUTUBE USER!!” What annoys me, no, depresses me about this is that people are gullible enough to copy/paste this crap in the first place. Still, I guess kids (or stupid adults) need to learn about idle threats sooner or later. I have gone years without a single Timmy showing up at my bedside with a bloody knife, and I'm still waiting for that vengeful ghost to waft into my room and smash me against my keyboaWrehy tedsjkdytsry ds7e6mre.,7 tuc kyfufgvuitl 7u jked8;ptpjsyr nbduy

  2. Bob. You remember him right? That little ASCII stick figure accompanied with something along the lines of “This is Bob! Copy and paste him to as many videos as you can to help him take over YouTube!” This pisses me off, not just for that frickin' cheerful stickman in the first place, but the war that ensued after it became big. First it was other users bemoaning the spread of the pitiful meme, THEN there was the even more cringe-inducing counter-attack. “This is Bunny! Copy and paste him to as many videos as you can to defend YouTube against Bob! (Oh, a saviour. Hoo-BLOODY-ray.)” As YouTube is (mostly) past its “immature” stage now, we no longer have to worry about this. Still, fear lingers in the back of my mind that it may return one day.

  3. Badly-executed tutorials. Tutorials exist on YouTube for almost everything you can imagine, and some have helped me immensely (especially when it came to video editing and harvesting corn from my vegie garden). However, to get to the good tutorials I had to wade through a whole lot of poor ones. The “90% of everything is crap” rule is demonstrated nowhere better than here. Bad frame rates from using freeware screen capture programs? Check. Poor-quality mics? Check. Using (God forbid) real time typing in Notepad and Word to communicate to viewers, usually beginning with a cringe-worthy “Hi YouTube”? Check. Using the pop song of the week as horribly jarring background music? Checkmate. Some tutorials even exist for things that don't really need tutorials, things that a monkey could figure out how to do. Whenever you turn to the internet for help, hope and pray that the end result is worth sitting through all the well-meaning but unwatchable “guides” out there.

  4. Slideshows. Whether it be about a person's favourite fictional character(s), a band, a sports star or stock images of “beautiful scenery” that everyone has already seen before (AAARGH), slideshows are everywhere on YouTube. Using pan, zoom, spin, colour cycling, whatever cheap video effects/transitions are at their disposal, and so painfully obviously made with Windows Movie Maker, these are the scum of the Earth, and numerous to boot. Maybe someone should start up a new website called SlideTube or some crap, where people can exclusively upload their awkward slideshows. Why? Because YouTube is a video-sharing website. And slideshows are NOT videos.

  5. 009 Sound System – Dreamscape. OH GOD, DREAMSCAPE. I hope I never have to hear that piece of music ever again. Oh, and that other song by 009 Sound System. Uh... you know the one? The title escapes me. Anyway. I guess Dreamscape isn't the worst song ever when you look at it objectively and don't take context into account, but when you think about the fact that video after video AFTER FREAKIN' VIDEO about almost anything (from that which is described above in points 3 and 4 to game footage) uses this song, you may begin to understand why I tense up whenever that first vocal note starts. “Aaaaah-aaaaah-aaaaah. Aaaaah-aaaaah-AAAH-aaaaah.” GET OUT OF MY HEAD. NOW.

Hmmm. I have just realised that “SlideTube” could very well be taken the wrong way. But no matter. Tally-ho ladies and gents, thank you for not knocking me off my soapbox. You're all beautiful. I'm out.

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