[amirmc]

> "Respondents were asked to score how each of the social media platforms they use impact upon issues such as anxiety, loneliness and community building. The site with the most positive rating was YouTube, followed by Twitter. Facebook and Snapchat came third and fourth respectively."

YouTube had the most positive rating!? I'm honestly not sure what to make of this. The experience of 14-24 year olds must be vastly different to the comments etc I've seen there.

[addicted]

Most people probably don’t interact with the comments. Most probably just watch the videos, ignore the comments, or glance at the comments and never venture back due to the toxicity of it all.

Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content. Instagram/Snapchat is the same, except now the comments are pictures with a whole lot of body shaming thrown in.

[DanielleMolloy]

> Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content.

Much of it, yes. But 1) tailor your Twitter stream to your (professional) interests, 2) ignore any trending news, 3) unfollow people who tweet random stuff or have too much Trump (or any current politics) in their mix and it will provide useful. I follow mostly computational neuroscience / machine learning scientists, and have heard much about recent research, summary articles or conferences first on Twitter. On an evening just two weeks ago I glanced at my list and saw a poster about one of the most intriguing research findings I've yet seen. Without Twitter I would have had to attend the conference or waited for the paper. Science Twitter is active and growing, and as scientists are busy people for many it has become a popular and low-effort announcement platform for new work (much better than university blogs or press releases and such).

I see much more toxicity glancing on any video's YouTube comments than on my Twitter stream.

[Asdfbla]

I find it pretty hard to curate even interesting lists of researchers on Twitter without running into too much fluff or political tweets. I don't blame them for using the medium as it might be intended and of course they are free to share their personal opinions, but in my experience even just a handful of people who tweet a bit too often can pollute your stream enough to make it annoying to follow along.

Maybe Twitter should just let you filter posts based on content. (Maybe it's already possible, I'm not a big Twitter user.)

[psyc]

Same here. I only follow graphics programmers and game developers. The graphics people are ok, but a few of them tweet a lot of politics in addition to content I wouldn’t want to miss. And game development is thoroughly saturated in The Culture War, so there’s no practical way to avoid that except to ignore it.

[woolvalley]

There is word filter feature, but the UX is a bit clunky and you cant subscribe / paste a big list of words you would like to filter.

A future feature I would like to see in social networks is automatically generating tags for posts and letting people filter out the posts based on that.

With that, I can just choose an automatically generated US politics filter for example and not have to maintain a mute list.

[steve_musk]

Well what was the “most intriguing research finding” you saw? Don’t leave us hanging haha

[warent]

> "Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content"

This is by far the best, most succinct description of Twitter I've ever heard. Love it. Keeping this one and requoting it forever, thank you

[Apocryphon]

The evanescent nature of Snapchat is probably what's making it less harmful than the others. Though disappearing content probably just introduces different issues.

[40acres]

YouTube is pretty great. Even the comment sections arent that bad from my experience. Youtube has a big 'celebrity' factor but unlike FB, Instagram and Snapchat those 'celebrities' are not your friends. If Logan Paul posts a vid from Japan that does not make me envious but if a friend of mine does I'm more likely to become jealous.

Youtube also has a great utility factor, you can learn a lot from youtube.

[dbasedweeb]

I love Youtube. All of the videos by Brady Haran are worth watching, Numberphile, Periodic Videos, and Sixty Symbols. There’s just a ton of great content, but of course there’s also a screaming pit of nastiness, politics, and conspiracy. The good news is that it’s incredibly easy to avoid the bad stuff, and easy to find the good stuff. YouTube is very much what you make of it, while Twitter is mostly toxic unless you curate aggressively.

[PKop]

Youtube (because it's video) is a way more open-ended platform allowing for deeper engagement with any subject matter vs the purposefully restricted medium of twitter or instagram which boxes you into to eye-catching photos, and overstimulating anxiety inducing rapid fire feed scrolling. It's mindless and unsatisfying.

Youtube has almost limitless niches of hours of content.

[dbasedweeb]

Definitely crazy depth of content. I’ve spent hours watching someone shoot novel shotgun loads, and that channel took me to another all about how to program and operate a CNC mill, and I spent hours there. I remember being home sick as a little kid, and daytime tv was a nightmare of talk shows and things like The People’s Court. If I was too tired or sick to read, I’d just watch that stuff and wish something else was on.

Now, with YouTube you could watch absolutely anything at all. Physics lectures, classical concerts, or just cute cats and JPop, whatever. I realize people like to most about “the youth of today,” but for the right kind of kid, the world is their oyster. All of the encyclopedias and libraries are online, all of the education and entertainment is right there. It’s incredible. You can learn to cook everything from fried cheese to haute cuisine, learn to play an instrument or just watch a guy acapella with himself, and everything in between. Whatever you want to see is just a click or two away.

[InclinedPlane]

YouTube isn't some tiny niche, it's a huge sprawling expanse of content. You may be shocked to learn that what others view on youtube is completely different from what you watch there, and that leads to different experiences. Not just in the details, but in character as well.

[chickenfries]

Lots of videos on youtube have comment sections that are just full of people who like the content positively discussing it. Usually not the kind of content that makes top trending.

For example, I enjoy the videos of PeterDraws. Just now, I went to his channel and checked out one of his most recent videos. All of the comments are positive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykc_XIPhjPY

[PKop]

Reminds me of a channel I like "Robin Seplut", a Russian man who goes out in the street and feeds cats everyday:

https://youtu.be/933AXPaTkv8

The comments are overwhelmingly positive. His videos are very popular, with quirky titles because of his limited english, no soundtracks, and daily kind gestures feeding starving cats. Just plain positive content.

Re: PeterDraws.. I don't think I've ever seen such a high "thumbs" up ratio with that many total votes.

One thing Youtube allows for, and I see it in both the video you linked as well as the cat video.. is ASMR-type content which serves as a strong antidote for the type of anxiety-inducing social media interactions we see with Instagram and others. I think it's because Youtube (and long form video in general) is a much more expansive medium. It allows for more focused, and slower, engagement vs rapid fire feed scrolling like twitter and insta.

[chickenfries]

> One thing Youtube allows for, and I see it in both the video you linked as well as the cat video.. is ASMR-type content which serves as a strong antidote for the type of anxiety-inducing social media interactions we see with Instagram and others.

Yes, absolutely. YouTube has it's own anxiety-inducing features, but you're right that this kind of content would never really truly succeed on Facebook or Instagram in the same way it has on YouTube. Peter's videos would probably have to be sped up and edited into something like the art equivalent of those Buzzfeed "Tasty" videos.

Thank you for sharing Robin's videos, I love this kind of content. It reminds me of another channel that I like, which is also very positive: please enjoy "James Blackwood - Raccoon Whisperer," a man from Nova Scotia who feeds Raccoons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHwmCwoqdKA

[pradn]

In my experience, the comments vary dramatically based on which part of the site they're on. Compare 70s Japanese jazz albums to political satire.

[blattimwind]

Don't look at comments.