Pretty much everyone who uses the internet, uses YouTube. But the ones who comment on YouTube represent the race to the bottom in terms of quality. The vast majority of internet users watch YouTube videos, but only the vile juvenile trolls and assholes bother to comment.

Install this and your experience will improve: http://www.tannr.com/herp-derp-youtube-comments/

My guess is that it has huge visibility and no moderation. There's almost no chance of your comment being deleted, no matter how vile, stupid or offensive it is, and it's in one of the biggest places of the internet. It's like doing graffiti on the White House, but you can get away with it.

Its like doing Grafitti in New York with 20 Cops and 3 sanitation workers taking care of the entire city. Of course you can get away with it, and there are plenty of people getting away with it.

Mean correlates with stupid. More stupid people watch TV than read. YouTube is TV.

It's a little bit more complicated than that. Every smart person I know browses Youtube. Youtube isn't like a TV network; most videos are only a few minutes long, so it's not inherently a timesuck the way that watching an hour long drama is.

The difference is that because Youtube has no moderation in its comments, smart people look at the comments and immediately decide that it's not worth their time. So, the only people who comment are the idiots who just like to see their words on the Internet.

Unfortunately, everyone browses YouTube. And there's a lot more not-smart people than smart people. (And teenagers have a lot more time on their hands than adults.)

I'd argue the root problem of YouTube comments is that they're not associated with any real community at all, in most cases. There's almost no benefit to posting a good comment, and no penalty to posting a stupid one.

Imagine how stupid the comments would be if everyone watching a TV show with you could post to the same wall.

This is definitely true. The smart people will be on a community like this, Reddit, or forum, post a link to the video, and discuss it within their own community. Only the idiots will post comments directly onto the video's page.

Really? Why in the world would they do that? Effectively zero of the smart people I know browse YouTube.

Most of my programmer friends listen to podcasts, but I honestly have no idea what smart people do with YouTube.

Some of the smart people I've heard of are on YouTube.

(http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/provos/)

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyUkYJeZtW4)

Wow. That article was awesome. The video was cool, too, although it didn't hold my interest like the story did.

The thing is, I don't doubt there's lots of interesting content on YouTube. I just can't conceive of browsing through it for fun. There's too much good stuff to read.

It's still a decently authoritative source for music.

Right, but every dumb person you know browses YouTube as well, and comment quality is pulled down by dumb people more easily than it can be pulled up by smart people.

Anything that requires actual reading already has a barrier to entry to the dumbest of the dumb.

I've found grim proof of this by observing people at shared computers in public libraries. It's not simply people watching a video now and then, but dozens of people spending their entire allotment of time watching YouTube as they would watch TV, amidst a sea of free books.

Proof of what? The post you're commenting on makes two claims: (1) mean correlates with stupid, (2) more stupid people watch TV than read. How does your library experience prove either of those things? I guess you meant (2), but how do you know how smart library users that watch videos on computers are and how smart library users that read are? Did you just apply some prejudice you have? I wouldn't regard that as proof. And as a person that greatly enjoys reading, watching TV and watching videos on YouTube, I'll probably be offended by any such prejudice. ;)

Quality of the videos, and like begets like?