Vlürch wrote: ↑12 Jan 2020 00:12
Huh... I didn't know there had been any controversy around it, but I remember thinking the film was pretty cool (but not great or anything).
'Controversy' is understating it. There were large-scale boycotts (at least, as large-scale as "boycotting a niche SF film because of LGBTQ issues regarding the author") gets.
Khemehekis wrote: ↑11 Jan 2020 22:27in my early years I got a comment that really hurt me
If it's not too personal to ask, how did you deal with it emotionally and practically? Like, I used to get a lot of negative comments and dislikes on my songs (and still do occasionally, but thankfully not nearly as much) and for years I got depressed as hell over every single one of them (and still feel like "wtf WHY"), and I almost always delete the comments unless they're just funny. How do you not let it get to you? Is there some mental trick to it, other than just repeating "people are entitled to their opinion" over and over again or something?
With respect, I think the first thing to say is that you probably can't just take this issue by itself and expect to flip a switch to change who you are; it's part of a wider sense of how you look at the world.
And then I think you might want to ask yourself why you get upset. I don't mean that in a provocative "why so serious" way, I mean that literally - what is it about negative comments that makes you upset? Because there are several possibilities. Maybe you don't like knowing that people see you in such a disrespectful light (so it's an issue with social status). Maybe you feel bad about yourself when people criticise you (so it's an issue with insecurity and self-worth). Maybe you just don't like people being rude and hostile to you (so it's an issue with confrontation). Maybe you don't like people messing up your channel with comments that don't fit what you want it to be (so it's an issue with control). What sort of comment upsets you? What doesn't? Because in each of these cases, there's a broader issue underpinning this particular one. Based on our previous interactions, I'm suspecting that negative comments trigger issues around self-worth for you, but I could be totally misreading you, only you really know. (and of course, these are just questions you might want to ask yourself, it's none of my business)
[And me? When I get pissed off at people online, as perhaps you may have noticed me be now and then, it's usually triggered by social status issues. I don't mind confrontation, but I hate being patronised, and I hate being bossed around, particularly by people who set themselves up as better than me and look down on me. In real life, I'm too polite to stand up for myself in many situations, so sometimes I overcompensate online, rather than just seeing the humour of the situation. But in my case, because my issue is around interpersonal status - that is, about how the people I'm interacting with are treating me as we persue a common goal together - I only really get wound up when I'm talking to someone, as it were, face-to-face, and anonymous snipes from people I don't know at all don't bother me too much. But other people, with other issues, are different...]
All that said, there are some things I think it's worth bearing in mind in general when faced with annoying people - not in lieu of a deeper examination of your own broader issues that you might want to develop over time, but as a healthy nudge in the right direction...
a) people can be annoying. But objectively, of all the problems in your life, whatever they may be, the opinion of random strangers on the internet is among the least pressing for you. My point here isn't that those comments shouldn't be a problem, but that you probably have more important problems to worry about. How do you ignore those comments? Well, if you'd just smashed your thumb with a hammer, or you'd just had a heart-attack or learnt that your dog/cat/child/parent/etc had been rushed to hospital or your house was flooding, then ignoring those comments would come pretty easily to you, wouldn't it? Most people, unless they have a serious problem in this area, would barely even notice a negative comment at a time like that. Of course they wouldn't - they'd barely notice it because they were concentrating far more on the urgent crisis at hand. Or, indeed, an urgent celebration - would you still even care about youtube comments if your child had just been born, you'd just won the lottery, your marriage proposal had just been accepted, you'd just been given the job of your dreams?
Of course, most of us, most of the time, aren't given that sort of really obviously urgent, obviously important distraction. But objectively, we are continually offered experiences in our lives which can have much more importance than a rogue online comment. So I'd turn your question around: rather than ask, "how do I ignore this thing?", I'd ask "why am I not paying more attention to these other things?" - if you throw yourself into your life with passion, then these minor irritations cease even being able to grab your attention.
b) most of the reasons we care about the opinions of random strangers are fallacious. If they're about our standing in a community - well, those people aren't a real community for you anyway, you're just lulled into imagining that they are (caring about the opinions of semi-strangers you do actually have an ongoing relationship, like forum co-members, with is a different and more complicated issue). If they're about what people think about you and the fear that they might be right - well, they don't know anything about you, so their opinions are meaningless anyway, they might as well be about somebody else. If they mess up a little happy space you've created for yourself - well, you didn't create a space for yourself, you claimed a little piece of the public plaza, so it's silly to act like you own the room (even though, of course, that's what the real landlords try to make you think...) - if that's what matters, you can go curate your own website, for example, rather than operate a public channel. And so on. Our emotions aren't directly rational... but most of our emotional responses are built upon beliefs, and if we regularly confront the accuracy and rationality of those beliefs, then the emotions built on them can be undermined.
c) in particular, to react in an informed way to a remark, you really need to understand the context in which it was made - why was it made? What was the commenter's meaning, and what was their intent? Were they joking, and in what way? Were they conveying a serious message to you? Were they trying to say one thing and it came out sounding like another? Were they putting on a performance to create an image in the eyes of a third party - or in their own? But we can never really understand the reasons and contexts of the things other people say. We can, through extensive interaction with a person, gradually approach (but never reach) a place of understanding, but with total strangers? We're lucky if we can understand their directions to the bus stop, let alone anything more meaningful. So it's generally unwise to place too much weight on what people say, and best to approach their comments in a spirit of charity and ambiguity, at least when you don't know them well. If, as you say above, you're in the habit of assuming that people are mouth-frothing fascists on the basis of their using a single word that you just think is statistically associated with being right-wing even though there's nothing inherently right-wing about it, then... well, you're kind of making problems for yourself for no reason...
d) specifically, most people, when you look at them in detail, have good, sensible reasons for their actions, from their point of view. They are mostly benign. If they seem to be otherwise, and it's not simply a matter of you misunderstanding their intent, then this is usually due either to colossal ignorance, or to a terrible situation they're in, in which emotions of fear and pain and powerlessness are driving them to act in ways that seem necessary to them, but that will almost always prove to be contrary to their own interests in the long-run, unless they're able to escape from their situation and the mind-set it has forced upon them. If you're not in that sort of situation, then you're privileged. And why would a privileged person be personally hurt and offended by seeing the lengths that a lack of that privilege has driven someone else to? Isn't that rather ungrateful? And unempathetic?
e) maybe they're right. Being confronted with truths can be uncomfortable, but it's more painful to reject them than it is to accept them and move on. Sometimes of course accepting the truth of a criticism means trying to improve yourself; sometimes, it means accepting your flaws; sometimes, it means appropriating the criticism and recontextualising what they see as a flaw as, instead, a virtue. And sometimes you have to conclude that, no, the criticism is just unfounded. But one way or another, it's usually more painful in the long-run to instinctively reject criticism than it would be to actually analyse its content.
Anyway, that's just a few things to maybe bear in mind.
Related to this, something I've noticed is that if there's one negative comment, there will usually be more. What really drives me up the wall is that if there comes one dislike, after that there will rarely be any more likes but only dislikes and the number of views drops very drastically; my most recent upload on my main channel is my latest full-length album, and before the first dislike there were exactly 40 views in a short span of time but after the first dislike there have only been 5 views altogether in almost half a year... it's like the algorithm decides to either stop recommending videos with a dislike altogether
There's probably a threefold thing - direct and doubly indirect.
In terms of the direct: I expect the algorithm weighs both currency (total views and recent frequency of views) and popularity (percentage of likes to dislikes) (as well as, of course, indirect network properties like how many other links a video leads people to click on). I suspect it's strongly weighted toward currency over popularity, because dank viral memes are the core of their business model, much more so than "videos about chocolate bar wrapper folding patterns with 100% of their five total viewers giving likes". What that means is that the more views you're getting, the higher the percentage of dislikes you can carry and still hit a certain level of promotion by the algorithm (they're OK with promoting videos that divide opinion, so long as they provoke a LOT of opinion). And conversely, that means that the fewer views you're getting, the less you can afford getting any dislikes.
Basically, I suspect that if you have a video with so few views that it would normally be too obscure to recommend, you can still get it recommended occasionally if its percentage popularity is very high, because that makes them think 'if it can stay this popular as it gets more views, it could be massive!' ...but once your percentage drops even a little, it stops being able to overcome its disadvantage in raw views. And there's also probably an inherent bias in this respect, because they know that the fewer views a video has, the more popular it SHOULD be, because its viewership is more self-selecting and hence more likely to like the video.
And then indirect. First, there's a knowledge question. The algorithm starts off not knowing who to show your video to, so it shows it to everyone (I mean, hardly anyone, but from every 'category' of viewer). But once people start disliking your video, it learns who NOT to show your video to. And in particular, if it learns NOT to show your video to the sort of people who are its natural audience, then you won't get many views at all... the algorithm is effectively conducting a random survey, and yes, in surveys even very small numbers of voters can be statistically informative guides.
And finally, the algorithm doesn't care if people like your video, only whether they stay on the website. It may well be that when people encounter dislikes, and in particular unpleasant comments, that disheartens them and encourages them to log off. This would lead to a disproportionate negative affect for videos with arguments in the comments. [And, ironically, for popular videos that encourage people to stop wasting their lives watching youtube...]