The Great Debate

[1337mokro]

You have CLEARLY never wandered onto a Creationist channel have you?

I honestly can't blame them for not wanting to be laughed at openly.

Then maybe they should research their position and not go out in public claiming ridiculous things as undeniable, unquestionable truths that are backed up by (forged) evidence that someone has in their basement and just can't show us (see also Mormonism).

I can't blame them for not wanting to be laughed at openly... but I can blame them for openly saying it, refusing to listen to any counter arguments and then expecting not to be laughed at when the evidence in the basement appears to be made in Peru.

It's kind of like the kid who doesn't really know the answer to a question, but then says it anyway and then refuses to admit that 2+2 =/= 5 but 4 and then quotes magic as his argument.

I can't blame him for not wanting to say the answer, but I can blame him for saying it and then stubbornly insisting that it must be true because leprechauns.

But they don't have to be laughed at, they can just block all those mean nasty people with their science and their facts from the youtube comments by only allowing approved comments.

On one hand, youtube comments can have importance, good criticism, and insight on the video uploaded. On the other hand.. more then 80% of the time they're unrealted to the video, debating with other users in the lowest ways, and can be seen as just bad overall.

I remember looking up Bioshock: Infinite trailer about Elizabeth's development, how she was to become a fully developed character that would have amazing AI programmed mechanics and can be very supportive only for the top comments to be like "I would tap that." (76 thumbs up)

.. *sigh*

Would you not like to tap that? She reminded me of early Elaine from Seinfeld which I would tap.

It really doesn't matter how inane and idiotic the comments end up being.

Disabling them completely shows weakness. It's just that simple.

Besides, there is no legitimate reason to do such a thing unless you specifically don't want people insulting you.

Turning off ratings is even worse.

My god, why would people want to NOT be insulted? What madness is this!

My god, why would people want to NOT be contradicted? What madness is this!

A very slippery madness my friend you see when you say such things you enter the Censorship zone. Where Offensive and Dissenting blur into one big mess where any opinion that does not echo your own soon flow into one big Offending blob that gets chucked out the metaphorical comment window.

As someone once said. I disagree with and am offended by your stupidity, but I will defend to the death your right to express that stupidity on internet forums. Or something along those lines, some freedom was taken in the exact wording.

Also there is no such thing as a right to not be offended outside of dictatorships

 

[Reeve]

Why stop at the YouTube comments section? What else on the web is better off censored... >.>

I'm sick of seeing ^this^ idiotic reasoning from the childishly sensitive Left. (What happened to the days where the Left were about freedom? They're as bad as the Right, these days.)

 

[The Inquisitive Mug]

Also there is no such thing as a right to not be offended outside of dictatorships

But there is absolutely a right to not listen to the opinions of others. Sure, you could simply not read said opinions, but let's not pretend that disabling the comments on a video that you own is some great slight in the face of free expression. The slope is not so slippery. Not all censorship is equal, or even necessarily evil by definition. No one is saying that you are not allowed to dissent; they're merely disabling your ability to dissent on the same page as the video.

If this were truly such an effective method of curbing discussion, we wouldn't be having this conversation right. Nor would the users above be having a conversation about Tropes VS. Women's disabled comment section. Clearly, disabling comments on her videos has not silenced the discussion.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

"Look at my video...just don't talk about it"

That's called television, and no one ever says that they're "silencing the debate" by not having a scrolling 1-800-OPINION line at the bottom of the screen.

It really doesn't matter how inane and idiotic the comments end up being.

Disabling them completely shows weakness. It's just that simple.

Besides, there is no legitimate reason to do such a thing unless you specifically don't want people insulting you.

Turning off ratings is even worse.

My god, why would people want to NOT be insulted? What madness is this!

Because they're thin skinned.

Even if there is a SINGLE constructive comment among 10 million insults, cutting off the comments is still silencing that opinion because you can't deal with people typing mean things.

The O'Reilly Factor doesn't have a comments section (save for when he shows a hate letter or two), but we all seem to have come to the consensus that Bill O'Reilly is a massive douche without it. [del]Censorship would be going into a comments and removing the ones which offend you.[/del] This is not "silencing opinions." This is simply not giving said opinions a floor on your video, which is perfectly reasonable. The idea that anyone who wants to share an idea must then be honor-bound to host, or even listen to, the opinions of the masses is not reasonable. Just as we are free to voice opinions, we are also free to not give a damn about the opinions of others.

EDIT: Strikethrough on my censorship example because THIS:

No meaningful definition of censorship limits it to anti-democratic government-instituted censorship.

Censorship is the ereasal or limitation of communication. If I'm quoting your post, and replacing a word with asterisks, then by most common definitions, I am "censoring" your line. If I'm asterisking out my own words, I am prcticing "self-censorship". When the Escapist is deleting forum posts, they are censoring commenters.

I'm not saying that all these forms of censorship are wrong, they might be necessary, but first of all we need to admit what it is. If you are blocking comments from your youtube page, then you are censoring your youtube page. You are limiting other people's communication. And just because you do it in a way that is within your legal rights, doesn't change that basic fact.

To deny that, just because censorship sounds like such an unpleasant word, is a pointless euphemism.

That all may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that it makes a video look weaker if a person is downright EXPECTING a comments section filled with negative feedback.

Leaving comments on shows confidence in the video they are presenting.

 

[TreuloseTomate]

It doesn't matter. Disabling comments and ratings is just bad form unless you are advertising.

 

[Do4600]

Sure, you won't know "who is a ****** and why" but you'll also not get any feedback what so ever. If the video really is an opinion based piece you may be just insulating yourself to other opinions on the same subject, and I can't think of a situation where it's a good idea to isolate yourself from others opinions. Sure you may be called a ******, but is it really that difficult for an intelligent person to look at a comment like that and come to the conclusion that:

1. Someone calling you gay isn't really much of an insult unless you consider homosexuals to be unsuitable.
2. The only contact this person has with you is that they saw 10 minutes of your opinion.
3. If this person resorts to using silly insults than it probably means they're unable to form a well reasoned argument against your opinion.
4. Poorly spelled insults say a lot more about the person typing than the person they're aimed at.

These comments are no reason to disable all discussion on a video.

If you consider the audience that useless then you must also consider that trying to express your opinion to that audience just as useless. It would be like trying to teach an ape how to do complex astrophysics, it's a waste of the ape's time and also a waste of the teacher's time.

So really there's no reason to post on youtube if you're going to disable the comments, unless you plan on using youtube as a host to put the video somewhere else. If you consider the audience you're reaching on youtube to be so worthless that they could never say anything that could ever be meaningful to you, that the audience you're expressing your opinion to will never understand your argument or opinion and only call you fag, then why the fuck would you ever bring your opinion to that audience? It's a waste of your time.

If you don't care if somebody has something actually meaningful to say to you, and you still block their comments you're being as close minded as the people who call others fags on the comments section on youtube.

Going to another place on the internet to comment on the specific form of an individual youtube video is just...silly unless the video is extremely popular, like "Gangnam Style". If I just started a thread on this website to comment on (which has a comments section.) A person would have to first be interested in the subject to watch the video before it would make sense. Youtube has a complex system that arranges videos in a such a way that chain videos together by subject matter, this allows a person to be interested in a subject before they click the video link. Not so on internet threads. Worldwide this video has about 743,000 hits, how many of them were from people who also use the forums on for instance The Escapist? Of the people who viewed this video only 1 in 400 commented on it. How many of them were people who visit the Escapist forums? How should I expect a discussion of this video when the odds are such that only 30 people were interested enough to watch even the first minute? No, the perfect place for a discussion to happen on a youtube video is on youtube where the viewer base for the video is located. Where the only reason the video was watched in many cases is because a person had enough interest in a topic to either look the video up directly or follow a series of other videos that have comparable subject matter.

 

[ThisGuyLikesNoTacos]

Hey, if breaking into other people's houses is considered limiting my freedom of expression, then so sure as hell is disabling comments on a video in the interwebs.

 

[1337mokro]

Also there is no such thing as a right to not be offended outside of dictatorships

But there is absolutely a right to not listen to the opinions of others. Sure, you could simply not read said opinions, but let's not pretend that disabling the comments on a video that you own is some great slight in the face of free expression. The slope is not so slippery. Not all censorship is equal, or even necessarily evil by definition. No one is saying that you are not allowed to dissent; they're merely disabling your ability to dissent on the same page as the video.

If this were truly such an effective method of curbing discussion, we wouldn't be having this conversation right. Nor would the users above be having a conversation about Tropes VS. Women's disabled comment section. Clearly, disabling comments on her videos has not silenced the discussion.

I think you meant to use the word Hear instead of Listen, because listening implies something else than hearing. You see nobody has a right to force you to listen to something. As in take heed of it or follow orders or something, so in that you are correct. However there exist no right to not hear an opinion. There exist no right that protects me from hearing bad music that I hate or hearing a public official spew hateful things.

You don't have a right to not hear something. You can ignore something, remove it if it is in infringing on your privacy, when a guy is following you or sending you unwanted letters and messages or showing up screaming in front of your house, but there is no right of not hearing. Because by that same stretch that right to not hear becomes a right to silence others.

Now expand turning off the discussion to the entirety of youtube. Then to other sites. Then to the entire internet. The supposition that disabling one comment section does not impede discussion is a flawed argument. That if youtube removes their discussions all together, the rest of the internet will allow for people to discuss. So what happens when every forum decides that they are done with the trolls, the whiners, the idiots and so on? They are using the same arguments and if they are valid on one site they are valid on another, so what would happen to your argument if everyone just decided that they were sick of hearing? For example what would happen if I had the power to just turn off the comments anywhere and I didn't want to hear your opinion? It wouldn't exist now would it, you'd have to find some underground forum where I had no power simply to express your dissent against me.

"Disabling comments is not censorship if youtube does it. We can just go somewhere else to talk about it!"

Unless there is no such place left. What you are saying here is possibly because you have an abundance of free speech. You can choose out of a slew of places to discuss your opinion and whatever else. However you may not be so fortunate when all the motivation you need to remove the ability to say anything is that someone simply doesn't want to hear it.

On youtube you are essentially taking a soapbox and standing in a park voicing your opinion. By disabling the comments you essentially forbid the people listening from saying anything. It would be akin to me getting a roll of ducktape and slapping a piece on everyone's mouth before I continue with my speech about whatever. The weak and flimsy excuse that you just don't want to hear it or that they should go to the other park to discuss what you just said is simply lazy and a self defeating statement when that other park imposes the same rules and the next one does the same and the next one and the next one and repeat ad nausea.

Because I live in this particular Park (read Country) I can say that the King of Thailand is a corrupt inbred mongrel resulting of a dated tradition that should be abolished. In Thailand I go to jail no matter WHERE I say that because of the king's "right" to not hear what I think of him.

Sure this is an extreme example, but it shows you that the slope is not just slippery, but that it is buttered up with 56 different types of grease and we are barely holding on. Your blase attitude to youtube comments is possible because you have other options. Just imagine if you didn't have those.

 

[TTYTYTTYYTTYTTTY]

These comments are no reason to disable all discussion on a video.

If you consider the audience that useless then you must also consider that trying to express your opinion to that audience just as useless. It would be like trying to teach an ape how to do complex astrophysics, it's a waste of the ape's time and also a waste of the teacher's time.

So really there's no reason to post on youtube if you're going to disable the comments, unless you plan on using youtube as a host to put the video somewhere else. If you consider the audience you're reaching on youtube to be so worthless that they could never say anything that could ever be meaningful to you, that the audience you're expressing your opinion to will never understand your argument or opinion and only call you fag, then why the fuck would you ever bring your opinion to that audience? It's a waste of your time.

If you don't care if somebody has something actually meaningful to say to you, and you still block their comments you're being as close minded as the people who call others fags on the comments section on youtube.

Finally someone with sense, was reading too much "lol youtube comments" when many escapists comments are the same or similar only with moderators with ban-hammerers around. There are many an insightful debate to be had even with 500 words apiece. In a conversation do you ever go on long winded monologues?

Yes, you have had to deal with jackasses, but you have not had a massive hate campaign against you. It's not just `what comes with the internet` and it's not okay.
Like I said, feel free to disagree with her decision, but after all that- fuck, I would have done the same thing.

And why are we to feel sad about this? She profited far more from her kickstarter than she would've without those "trolls" giving her free advertising and pity from the general person. She also only received those 1 million views, due to those "trolls".

We all have to deal with "trolls" and get over it, it's called life.

 

[Phasmal]

And why are we to feel sad about this? She profited far more from her kickstarter than she would've without those "trolls" giving her free advertising and pity from the general person. She also only received those 1 million views, due to those "trolls".

We all have to deal with "trolls" and get over it, it's called life.

She actually doesn't have to deal with them, that's why she turned off comments. So she doesn't have to.
And we don't all have to deal with hundreds of people viciously attacking us.
Either way, I don't really care. She'll do what she wants, people will cry about it.

 

[Darks63]

Considering what i see underneath many vids maybe she was right to disable the comments section. If you look at any vid over say 1000 replies you will see a trend of people commenting on one thing that can often have little to do with the actual vid. For example someone posts a vid of Static x I guarantee the comments section will be derailed by a Beiber is a no talent fag hate chain or any vid that has anything to do religion will get derailed into god vs god is dead.

Also lets not forget the 400 pound gorilla in the room and that is the user's ability to downvote someones comment to the point of it not showing up unless you click on it. Any good point or any point which might be seen a being in any way in favor of her point would likely suffer that fate. Not to mention moderating her vids with a likely one hundred thousand plus comments would be pretty time consuming she would likely have to start another kickstarter to hire a staff to handle that.

 

[The Inquisitive Mug]

I think you meant to use the word Hear instead of Listen, because listening implies something else than hearing. You see nobody has a right to force you to listen to something. As in take heed of it or follow orders or something, so in that you are correct. However there exist no right to not hear an opinion. There exist no right that protects me from hearing bad music that I hate or hearing a public official spew hateful things.

You absolutely have a right to protect you from hearing bad music or hate speech. You can wear headphones that play music you enjoy, wear earmuffs or earplugs, or even stick your fingers in your ears and yell "LA LA LA LA LA LA." All of these things are not only possible, but well within your rights. Saying that everyone has to hear everything you say is the opposite extreme of saying no one should be able to say things you don't like. If YouTube contributors don't want to hear (rather, READ) comments, they disable comments. They are able to do this. They do not get arrested and their accounts are not deleted for doing so, so clearly they do have a right not to hear things they do not want to.

You don't have a right to not hear something. You can ignore something, remove it if it is in infringing on your privacy, when a guy is following you or sending you unwanted letters and messages or showing up screaming in front of your house, but there is no right of not hearing. Because by that same stretch that right to not hear becomes a right to silence others.

Why should they have to hear things that they don't like, but they cannot do things you don't like (disable comments)? You were the one to bring up what rights we do and do not have. No one on YouTube has hand-picked your rights. I understand if you are not in favor of such a thing, but to say that they do not have the right to do so is more oppressive than the very thing you're criticizing them for.

Now expand turning off the discussion to the entirety of youtube. Then to other sites. Then to the entire internet. The supposition that disabling one comment section does not impede discussion is a flawed argument. That if youtube removes their discussions all together, the rest of the internet will allow for people to discuss. So what happens when every forum decides that they are done with the trolls, the whiners, the idiots and so on? They are using the same arguments and if they are valid on one site they are valid on another, so what would happen to your argument if everyone just decided that they were sick of hearing? For example what would happen if I had the power to just turn off the comments anywhere and I didn't want to hear your opinion? It wouldn't exist now would it, you'd have to find some underground forum where I had no power simply to express your dissent against me.

You're only providing an example of your slippery slope argument, not providing evidence that one exists.

"Disabling comments is not censorship if youtube does it. We can just go somewhere else to talk about it!"

Unless there is no such place left. What you are saying here is possibly because you have an abundance of free speech. You can choose out of a slew of places to discuss your opinion and whatever else. However you may not be so fortunate when all the motivation you need to remove the ability to say anything is that someone simply doesn't want to hear it.

I don't see how I could have an "abundance" of free speech. Free speech is just that: free. To say that I have an abundance of it implies that having a deficit of free speech is possible. To have a deficit of free speech would be to limit what I am and am not able to say. It would no longer be free speech. Besides, we're not talking about limiting WHAT people say, only where they say it (an argument you seem to have agreed with in your "showing up in front of your house screaming" statement.)

On youtube you are essentially taking a soapbox and standing in a park voicing your opinion. By disabling the comments you essentially forbid the people listening from saying anything. It would be akin to me getting a roll of ducktape and slapping a piece on everyone's mouth before I continue with my speech about whatever. The weak and flimsy excuse that you just don't want to hear it or that they should go to the other park to discuss what you just said is simply lazy and a self defeating statement when that other park imposes the same rules and the next one does the same and the next one and the next one and repeat ad nausea.

Slippery slope again, but I digress. Your point falls flat when you use the park for your example. The park is a public place. Your YouTube channel is YOURS. You may say "But YouTube is a public website!" True, YouTube is public. But if your channel is then also public by extension, why are we given the option to set our videos to "Private?" We own the intellectual property within them, we can control who sees and shares them, and we make money off of them. Our channels and the content on them belong to us. I shouldn't be able to say things on someone's channel against their will any more than I should be able to publish editorials on the front page of The Escapist, or someone would be able to show up at your house screaming incoherently.

Because I live in this particular Park (read Country) I can say that the King of Thailand is a corrupt inbred mongrel resulting of a dated tradition that should be abolished. In Thailand I go to jail no matter WHERE I say that because of the king's "right" to not hear what I think of him.

Sure this is an extreme example, but it shows you that the slope is not just slippery, but that it is buttered up with 56 different types of grease and we are barely holding on.

I agree, this is an extreme example, and I don't think it works in this context.

 

[immortalfrieza]

It's quite simple, if you don't want to hear idiots commenting obscene crap all the time on your video, DON'T POST THE VIDEO TO BEGIN WITH!!! If you are so sensitive that you can't just ignore what those idiots post like a mature human being and just read the comments worth reading, you shouldn't be putting videos on the net. Disabling comments because of idiots is no less a dick move than what those idiots themselves post to begin with. Worse, you're condemning everybody for the actions of only a few.

Oh, and the definition of censorship is: "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." So yes, disabling comments IS censorship.

 

[danon]

Yeah people have fought countless wars over the ability to say and stand for what you want and died in the millions for it. But you know if people send some hate your way just blanket censor everyone because that helps. The new thing is censoring and it's going to get much worse.

 

[Requia]

Honestly, disabling youtube comments only does the world a favor. But its not as if Anita allows discourse on any other site, hell she could almost entirely dodge the trolls by creating a backers only forum. Plus she's perfectly happy to have youtube comments when she's after press attention for a kickstarter campaign.

 

[1337mokro]

Text Edited for brevity, or was it?

So what you just said was that you have a right to protect yourself from hearing something by ignoring it, doesn't really matter how you do it that's basically what you are doing . Congratulations you went 100% full circle! You however have no right to smash the other guys "insert music machine brand" or stop them from talking just so you don't have to hear it.

It's actually a very simple thing that I already explained and with the first paragraph explained it the second time. However I am a good sport and will thus repeat myself a third time. You do not have a right to not hear something, you can ignore something, block it out or remove yourself from the place where things are being said. However you have no right to prevent yourself from hearing something by taking away the ability to voice something from another person.

In less eloquent terms you could literally spread your cheeks and overpower the other guy by the sound of your flatulence drowning out their voice, thus preventing you from hearing them, but you can never duck tape his mouth shut just so you don't have to hear it. Therefore there is no right to not hear something, there is simply no law that says you have to hear them.

Did I not just give you a nice example? If a Thailander living in Thailand says something bad about the King Anywhere, they get arrested. In other words a person with the ability to silence a particular set of comments anywhere has done so and enacted punishment on those that did so. All for the sake of not wanting to be offending or having to hear critique. I think it actually fits quite perfectly. You see the King is a Youtuber, he doesn't like to be called an opulent dictator with a penis the size of shaven down pencil. So what did he do? He applied a national level filter to the comment section of his entire country. Making sure that no mean things were being said about him anywhere. Should anyone dare to do so though then that comment is quickly deleted with a nice jail sentence.

I don't think I could have found a better real world example than that. Now I deliberately did not go for the easy and even more extreme ones like China, North Korea or Russia, where dissenting journalists are liquidated. That would have been bad examples because those are basically censorship ruled regimes. They are however a nice example of how free speech is not just binary but a gradient where certain things are allowed to be talked about and other things aren't.

Think of the gradient of free speech like the rules of conduct on the Escapist where I can admit to piracy, but on Steam forums I get banned even if it was a game not even available on their services.

I guess you think you own your facebook page and your videogames, how cute. No the same license bullshit they tack onto your games also applies to your channel. In reality your channel is on loan from youtube, they allow you this space to post content, view content, etc. in and can terminate, edit or change any content in it for any reason. In other words youtube is like a park in internet land, where everyone can go and talk, laugh, do whatever but the park is still owned by youtube. Your channel is just the soapbox you are standing on in that park

Sure we can bicker about the differences in places where you can exercise free speech and the ability to speak freely but that is all just semantics. Best left behind with the same notion that you own your youtube channel and that it is in some way a private area.

The thing being that if the notion that an offending or unpleasant remark warrants it's exclusion from a comment section or the closing of that comment section is acceptable then we really don't have much left do we? As I pointed out already had I enjoyed the power to filter comments I could have simply filtered yours out, you see people not agreeing with me offends me quite severely and this entire discussion would never have happened. You might have gone to some other forums I frequent but I would find you filter you out all the same, I might have gone a step further and started actively filtering out your comments on random sites, eventually silence you in almost all of the public forums forcing you to either give up or go deeper underground.

It is a slippery slope, especially when people think some compromises on free speech should be admissible for the sake of sparing someone's feelings.

(Also if you are just going to answer in chronological order, don't break up the comment in separate sections. Just a pet peeve of mine but it makes it harder to respond to and annoying to read.)

 

[dharmaBum0]

Freedom of speech means Sarkeesian is entitled to not subject herself, or her viewers, to the inane ramblings of illiterate morons in a comment section.

 

[1337mokro]

Freedom of speech means Sarkeesian is entitled to not subject herself, or her viewers, to the inane ramblings of illiterate morons in a comment section.

It actually means the exact opposite, that she can't prevent those people from saying insane things even if she wanted to. Thankfully though there is no law that says she has to hear them, meaning that if she ignores them nobody will force her to read them.

Though if that is all you are concerned about then she could just disable comment notifications on those videos and still allow people to comment. Best of both worlds, the idiots can scream and she doesn't have to hear them.

 

[NightmareExpress]

and its not like the voting system makes sure smart comments get to the top.

The most common comments that make it to the top (on Youtube) are;

a) directly quoted from the video
b) an unoriginal quip with varying degrees of relevency to the content of the video
c) a personal story that may or may not be true
d) some comment regarding the thumb rating system
e) implying that the content of the video is better than celebrity x
f) something incredibly crass

Based on an observational period of seven years.
"Smart" comments are rare and the Youtube democracy you speak of is as flawed as the concept is outside the internet.
If an idiotic idea is popular among an ignorant crowd that happens to form the majority, it's going to win. Meanwhile, something smart, meaningful and well versed is going to get buried by trash in the silent tragedy that is the comment section.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the voting system does not make sure a smart comment gets featured.
It grants it an opportunity and then throws the decision to the masses most likely looking for something crude and comedic.