I wonder if this happened in the French salons of the Enlightenment?

I was looking up a certain Youtube video that's been on the news lately. I won't say which one, the trollish moron who made it doesn't deserve recognition of any sort, and the title of the video will mean nothing in a couple weeks, anyway.

I don't know if you've ever tried looking for a video on Youtube a day or two after making international news, but it's next to impossible. Youtube is a microcosm of the Internet, and like the Internet, it's a vast echo chamber, with everything repeating back on itself, and dropping in fidelity each time. In other words, by the time I went looking for the video, it had been redacted down into hundreds of bite-sized clips, as well as a countless number of copycats and fakes. There were probably a few Rick Astley videos crammed in there, as well.

I found one video that I thought might be the right one, since the title and the length of the video matched what I'd read in the news. So I checked it out, and found it to be an even more poorly-produced piece of garbage than I'd expected. I also couldn't make sense out of the dialogue, as people seemed to be responding to other people's internal monologue. About then is when I spotted a comment saying the original dialogue had been overdubbed.

It was the comments more than the video itself that got me. People had written freaking essays, paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff about the video. And most of it was commenters arguing with each other on topics peripheral to the subject of the video itself.

This isn't the first time I've seen anything like this on Youtube, either. It makes me wonder who these people are, and what they think they're accomplishing. Does user mcpeepants92 type out a comment refuting the claims made in Absolute Undeniable Proof Of Young Earth Creationism* thinking to himself "This is really gonna set the record straight once and for all."

Youtube

It's like some kind of infinite recursion.The guy who made and posted the "Absolute Undeniable Proof Of Young Earth Creationism" clearly thought he was ending the argument forever. Unless he was actually parodying those kinds of people, but for the sake of this argument let's assume he was acting in earnest. So, he posts this video, and he says to himself "There, that'll shut up all those Evolution morons out there."

Then someone else comes along. Maybe he's a troll. Maybe he's in a bad mood. Maybe he's a die-hard Evolutionist with more opinions than good sense. Maybe he's just bored. Either way, he comes upon this video, watches it, and says to himself "This cannot stand."

So he leaves a long comment to the post. One so long that even the OP is saying "tl;dr." And the whole time he's thinking to himself "Hah, this will put that guy in his place."

But astonishingly, "that guy" doesn't roll over and play dead. And even if he does, there's someone else out there who agrees with him, and is willing to take up the torch. He might write out a rebuttal to every point in the comment, but he's more likely to latch onto one part of it and go off on a tangent about it. And away we go.

In a way, I guess it's good there's places like Youtube for these people. It keeps them and their whackjob opinions out of general circulation. Or rather, it gives them an outlet, so they're less likely to assault co-workers or strangers on the street upon whom to deliver their manifesto. If they want to see themselves as Diogenes, let them do it in the privacy of the Internet, where they're a lot easier to ignore.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

*I am not a believer in Young Earth Creationism** so don't bother arguing about it with me.
** I also don't want to hear your arguments for Young Earth Creationism.