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  1. Eli, you’re not giving up. You found the door, you chose to walk through the door. Some would say that takes more courage than trying to stick it out for the sake of the YouTube platform and your channel revenue.

    Definitely isn’t worth the psychological abuse. It would bother me a lot if I saw what comments had done to my attitude about something I enjoy doing. We try not let it happen, but if you remain immersed in a toxic community, you’ll eventually become toxic yourself.

  2. Well, comments, comments…
    Communication supposed to be something that is enjoyable.
    As a content creator it is your burden to set communication that way, that you will enjoy it.

    So you did the correct step and stopped the destructive comments.
    The next step, just to continue with good environment here.

    And yes, yes, yes, please do more class videos you are good at it.
    About the communication maybe you will need to separate it from video creation, let somebody else to communicate as your rep?
    As for me it was a long day today, enjoy you submarine -)

    • Honestly YouTube is so screwy at this point it will be hard to say how this changes things there. From a personal standpoint I think I should have done it a year ago. It’s hard to explain, but I feel just a profound quiet over the past few days…

  4. Yup seen this type of burn out before when it comes to dealing with a free ‘community’ comments board (did some open source work in the past, will probably do so again in the future when time allows).

    Generally I find that when dealing with feedback I tend to go through a simple (and somewhat brutal) decision tree: –

    1) Have they provided reasonable, considered, constructive feedback with added justifications etc?

    If no I feel free to ignore/delete/ban based on if I have had my allotted caffeine intake for the hour/day/week (a finely balanced equation at the best of times).

    2) Does the person belong to your target audience (do they have weight or a stake in the outcome or product, in short, does there opinion actually ‘matter’)?

    If the answer is no to the second question then I may still consider there opinion, but that is completely at my discretion and may also be subject to caffeine ppm in my blood stream.

    I generally work on the principle that people certainly do have the right to freedom of speech but I also have the right to think about what they have said an act accordingly (be that all of a nano second if the answer to question 1 is a no).

    If you have no time to deal with the comments of the free community however, you should also feel free to shut down that avenue of communication, after all it is ‘free’ and may not be worth dealing with if no value is obtained from the comments at your end.

    • …. yeah… every content creator I know intellectually grasps the concept… it still gets to you though…

      After a few days I have ZERO qualms with turning off the comments. There is just a profound sense of quiet now when I’m using YouTube

  6. I read this article today and they may have even titled it “Life on the platform plantation”:
    https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/workers-are-the-heart-of-the-algorithm/2018/01/29

    Also there is this interesting book on how much damage delegating the wrong things to algorithms can cause: Weapons of Math Destruction
    https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-Inequality/dp/0553418815/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1517216924&sr=8-1

  7. I think I agree with Eli on this one. Youtube comments are good for social videos or political commentary.For people who want to have serious conversations and get work done its a total shitshow.

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