So the comment section is a good thing for society.

I had YET to hear Laurel until I watched the 'explained' vid @eric3579 posted here in the comment section when they changed the pitch up 30% @1:51. I'd tried with and without headphones, different times of day/night, stoned/not stoned, saying the word Laurel out loud before playing the video. Evidently I'm primed in the minority because I sure as hell don't have younger ears!

My bad, I have been on the youtube comments section, and people do say things that ignorant regularly there, so it threw me off :-)

Then you must remove it immediately. This is called a self link, and is forbidden on this site. Please kill the video now before you are permanently banned. (Type "*kill" in the comments section)
Because you nicely replied so quickly, I won't ban you right now, but please remove it now before others ban you.

Makes me think of the guy who videotaped the woman at the Chick-Fil-A drive thru, figuring he would be lauded as a hero for challenging someone who worked for that company. And it backfired and he became unemployed because of his "principles", which was pretty much what he expected of that woman. And then he played the victim. But he brought it on himself, the woman who tweeted about AIDS in Africa is a whole other story.

Now that everyone has the power to self-publish and broadcast just about anything to the entire world I'm seeing the power that it unleashes in others. I posted a comment on an unsolicited news posting in my FB feed, regarding the Pulitzer Prize picture of the black woman holding out her hands to be handcuffed by the police in riot gear. And everyone in the comment section is going predictably teary-eyed and goose pimply over it, with the usual cliches of iconic, defining, inspiring, uplifting, etc.

And I wrote "don't be so easily manipulated, it's stagey and predictable and Kardashians use this shit to sell sugar water." or something like that. My point being that we have gone from prize-winning pictures of the Viet Nam war (e.g.) to the whole process being co-opted by pop culture, like everything and anything else. Of course I got bombarded with claims of racism and people who pitied my soul. And some were musing on whether to try to track down my employer. I deleted my comment, this world has gotten too fucking weird for me.

I'm almost never in Sift Talk, but I noticed this too. Used to be that to make the top 15 a video would have to get well over the 10-vote generic "sifted" status, but recently I've seen several occasions when there aren't enough videos with 10+ votes to even fill out the top 15 completely.

I'm not an extremely long-time sifter, I've had an account here for 8 years and lurked for probably a couple before that. But in general, the main reasons that I actually joined the community here when I rarely do anything more than lurk (no facebook / reddit / whatever for me) still apply:

Standard YouTube isn't a community, it is a toxic wasteland. Trolls are the rule, not the exception. By far.

On the Sift, I rarely participate by actually posting videos, but the comments sections on videos here are a massive breath of fresh air compared to other sites (particularly YouTube). That's what drew me here and has kept me here.


That being said, I think we've been losing some of the openness to different opinions that has been a real strength of the sift community. With such a divisive US President, I'm sure some of that is inevitable. But, while we've always been better about that than elsewhere on the internet, I think we're losing some of that advantage.

I think the sift leans left -- not extreme, but noticeably. I used to lean moderately right, although generally more in the middle on social issues. My time on the sift (and also NOT living in the US) has pushed me more to the left, again particularly on social issues, but even on the meat-and-potatoes stuff that I think actually belongs in the realm of government. I'm still to the right of sift average, but closer than I was. Credit for that shift in my viewpoints is definitely in part due to the sane, open-minded, and accommodating debates in comments here.

I recognize that it is hard to be accommodating to some of the sifters that are further to the right than I ever was. A certain basketball coach comes to mind. But even when viewpoints from sources like that veer into territory that we find intolerable, I think we here at the sift used to be better about rationally but firmly voicing disagreement without sort of ... picking a fight. If that makes sense.

Just speaking for myself, I think I've probably been upvoting videos less because a higher percentage of what is being sifted is political, and I get fatigued with the volume of that. That's very much tied in to the current situation and media environment, so there isn't necessarily anything to be done about it, but I'd wager that is partially responsible for the lower traffic beyond just myself.

You need to type " *kill " in the comment section to remove from the sift.
https://videosift.com/faq#posting_guidelines

If you type *kill into the comment section it will remove your video and maybe prevent you from being banned. Maybe

I see @lucky760 redacted the comments but for me some video pages still won't display the comment sections and the ones that do are ridiculously slow to open. Work in progress? Anywhere those comments were are still slowing down the loading of the comments and some won't load at all.

Can anyone see the comments on this video? They won't come up for me (one of a handful of videos that won't show the comments). https://videosift.com/video/Roger-Waters-Performs-On-The-Late-Show-with-Stephen-Colbert

Sigh. We had two really awesome video rental places nearby that survived until around 2008. They always had all the good indie and classic films from decades ago, but at some point in the 2000s people just stopped returning the rarer vids. I remember calling every video rental store in the area looking for Kids and Gummo and being pissed off because people who rented those movies usually just kept them and never came back.

I stopped going after the locals spots started offering to sell you a rental if it wasn't a new release or if it was a VHS (even if it was not released on DVD yet!). Not that I didn't like new releases, but sometimes you just want to watch something like Commando but you don't want to add it to your collection because maybe you'll watch it once every ten years or so. Then you go to the store and there's no Commando available because someone snatched it up. That ruined the concept of video rental for me. I would just end up ranting with the clerk for like an hour about good movies and rental blues, then head home empty handed.

Now I have Netflix -- but it doesn't even have a comment section any more. Oh well, IMDB boards ftw.

This one is pure gold, if you ask me. It's an excerpt from a Judicial Watch panel discussion about Clinton's email affaire, and it features Joseph diGenova taking a ginormous shit on James Comey for taking a dive.

Duration is about 10 minutes.

Lifted from the comment section on yesterday's link list over at NakedCapitalism.

Per the comment section of the video, the driver was arrested and the family inside the van suffered injuries, but none were life threatening.

Wow, didn't expect to see the comments section explode like this. Seems like some people took what he was saying seriously in spite of the multiple disclaimers he gives the audience that this whole bit is a joke.

I could absolutely see why someone who is an actual Cosby rape victim and takes Jefferies's words seriously would be offended. I could absolutely see someone not being able to transcend their own personal pain in order to see the irony in this bit. But this seems like a wholly different kind of joke from the one Dave Tosh allegedly made in which it was really unclear whether he was joking or not about inviting audience members to rape a woman for daring to heckle him during a set. I don't see any malice in this routine whatsoever.

If you don't find it funny, that's fine. Every joke doesn't have to be funny to every single person on the planet. And if you don't approve of rape jokes, that's fine too. Like Reginald D. Hunter says, go ahead and withhold your laughter. "But take it from the rest of us who did laugh--it was fuckin' funny."

Type " *kill " or " *discard " in the comment section. *kill or *discard

Take it easy bud, this is not the Yahoo! comment section.