[coldtea]

>There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a community that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there.

Is it? I always admired the much-scoffed YouTube as the free-est place to talk on the internet. Where a vegan gay liberal from NY can discuss on the same video with a neo-con Mongolian and a 15-year old hipster from Sweden, an Israeli Jew, an Arab, and a black South African truck driver, and even agree and share experiences, and at worse you just get a few insults thrown and that's it.

[kyledrake]

I agree with you, but this isn't just about morons lobbing dumb insults at each other in all caps with bad spelling. I'm not even comfortable describing in a comment some of the horrible things that content moderators have had to deal with. Dig through the documents (particularly the child abuse doc) and you'll get an idea. Almost all of these policies were likely created from real-life examples, because people do things that are disturbing beyond imagination. They certainly didn't pre-plan it when they were hacking together Facebook in a dorm.

I can only imagine how much worse it is for the team over at Youtube. The first thing I would do as CEO over there is hug them, give them a raise, double their vacation time, and make sure they have very good access to mental health services in case they need it. I'm not saying they're treated poorly right now, but again, it would be one of the first things I looked at.

[praneshp]

They can all write down what they feel/think. There is no discussion, IMO.

[hashhar]

I find Reddit a lot better for that kind of conversation (excepting certain subs like /r/the_donald, /r/resist, /r/worldnews, /r/politics and certain others).

/r/AskReddit is one of the best places to have such free and open conversations and the best thing is that you get to set the topic for the conversation instead of some arbitrary video remotely related to what you want to talk about.

[coldtea]

>and the best thing is that you get to set the topic for the conversation instead of some arbitrary video remotely related to what you want to talk about.

That's a good point (allowing for deeper discussion), but in YouTube I also like how the image/video transcends borders and politics etc in a way that targeted discussion doesn't.

(You can be anything, black, KKK, hipster barrista, 40yo soccer mon, Jew, Arab, donald-fan, etc, but still like/dislike the same cat clip, or old bluegrass song, or belly dancing or whatever).

[matt4077]

That's probably a good example of why "freedom" isn't the right way to measure a community's value. Because the entirety of all youtube comments' value can only be measured in what worse things they authors were prevented from doing while commenting there.

Freedom of speech is great, and important. That doesn't mean that there's any value in just anybody exploring the boundaries of it.

[qb45]

> Because the entirety of all youtube comments' value can only be measured in what worse things they authors were prevented from doing while commenting there.

This says more about your sampling bias than youtube itself.

And the fact you are posting this says more about the magnitude of your political bias (its exact direction being yet tbd) than anything you read. I'm not sure if you realize how many nuts really say what they believe and believe what they say.

[coldtea]

>This says more about your sampling bias than youtube itself. And the fact you are posting this says more about the magnitude of your political bias (its exact direction being yet tbd) than anything you read.

And both of the above say more about your willingness to characterize the parent than about the issue under discussion.

>I'm not sure if you realize how many nuts really say what they believe and believe what they say.

Doesn't seem to matter, as long as they don't also ACT on what they believe/say. Which is the case for most people (both positive, e.g. they are racist but they wont act on it, and negative, e.g. they say their are this or that good thing, but they're all talk about it).