I Have Found the Magical YouTube Video

This, dear ladies, gentlemen and others, is a true story. It might seem inconceivable, it might always seem irreverent in its complete departure from the natural order of things, but I assure you that it is what actually happened, even though now it all seems like a dream…

Late last night when I, as per usual, could not sleep, I was roaming around the magical world of YouTube to entertain me. I do not consider myself a part of the YouTube-generation, but I do highly enjoy the site when small injections of entertainment is required.

I was watching various viral videos, most very whimsical, some with a professional veneer, and they were titillating my senses with their variety of views of the world.

Everything was new and everything was like it has always been. The videos were entertaining, but rarely surprising, and the comments below were just as they always are, like all frequent visitors have learned and accepted that they are.

Suddenly I felt a yearning for some classical music. I made a few searches and listened to a couple of versions of some of the more accessible examples of music from days long since gone.

I came across several amateur renditions of Fur Elise, I listened and I enjoyed. Watching hands move across a piano holds strangely little fascination to me though, so while listening I mostly occupied myself with scrolling down and perusing the comments. The YouTube comments holds some sort of morbid fascination to me, so when I don’t have any reason to actually watch the video I often read them like that.

It was the usual snippets of vile bile and wildly uninteresting spam and I was once again wondering why I was even reading them. Then, suddenly, something struck me like a blow to the stomach. While reading the comments to one particular video something was extremely strange.

I rubbed my eyes. I was amazed. Awestruck. Since it was the middle of the night and I was actually starting to get tired I thought I might be dreaming. I had to stop myself and start reading again from the top just to make sure that I wasn’t mistaken.

After a while I could feel certain that I was neither dreaming nor mistaken. What I had first thought was true; there were hundreds of comments, but not an angry or hateful word. There were just… Compliments. Nice things.

The woman playing was not perfect. She was good, very good, much better than I have a chance to ever be. I am duly envious of her talent and the hard work she must have put in. But still, even I could hear some of the mistakes made. Normally any little mistake would be repeatedly pointed out in the comments in vile and insulting ways. Now people saw past trivial mistakes and somehow just complimented her for being talented overall.

I looked through all the comments. It wasn’t just that no one was pointing out the mistakes. No one was saying “Gee, get a fucking life, nerd”. No one wrote that she was fat or ugly (not that much of her could be seen, but that is rarely a problem for those who enjoy posting comments like that) nor was anyone saying that she was “fukking smexy” and that they would like to sex her up.

There was no sign of the usual “Why do you bother putting this shit up? I could do better when I was three years old!”-type of comments. There wasn’t even one person telling her to give up any aspirations of ever getting good and no one told her that the video had wasted their precious time.

My jaw was figuratively on the floor. There wasn’t even any spam!

And now, it all feels like a dream again. I can no longer find the video and though I feel certain that it did exist I can’t really grasp that it happened. It truly must have been a magical video, somehow forcing people do be nice and behave. That video should be used to resolve international conflicts, if it can make people commenting on YouTube be polite and civilized.


Seriously though. I do understand that this has probably happened before. There have probably been many times when a video have gotten at least mostly positive comments. But I think anyone who regularly reads the comments on YouTube agree that (and I do apologize for my language) “What the fuck is up with YouTube commenters” is often a very valid question to ask.

It seems like a majority of the people commenting truly do not enjoy a single video they watch but they still keep coming back, spreading their hatred in the comment-sections of video after video. Not to mention all the people claiming that videos were a waste of their time, while they still take the time to actually comment. It’s all very confusing to me.