Stop telling me my video topics are not important. I know and I’m ok with it.

I don’t often complain about my job, but when I do it’s an essay

I get hate comments all the time. Comments telling me I’m ugly or stupid or that my videos are bad. Every now and then I’ll even get a comment telling me all three at once. 

I don’t love the fact that there’s a chance I’ll have to read something mean about myself every time I open the YouTube studio app, but it doesn’t stop me from reading my comments, either. The vast majority of them are clever and interesting and kind, so if it means I have to shrug off a couple of insults to enjoy an overwhelmingly vibrant and thoughtful community, then so be it. I’ve done harder things for far smaller rewards. 

For months now, however, I’ve noticed a new type of comment - not just in my comment section but on social media in general - that seeks to disparage and belittle content creators just as much as the openly negative ones. I’m talking about the “it’s not that deep” comment.

I don’t often see this exact phrase in my own comment section, but I’ve recently read some equivalents. On the openly hateful end of the spectrum, someone commented on my latest video that I must have been out in the sun too long. Just a few days prior I had received a comment telling me I needed to touch grass. I don’t reply to hate comments, but if I did I would assure both of them that I take a daily (shaded!) walk in a beautiful wood near my house, which is probably how I have managed to never leave frustrated comments on other people’s posts. 

On the more civil end of the aforementioned spectrum there are comments from people telling me that the issues I discuss in my videos are “not new”. People have always overconsumed books, people have always been performative about their reading, people have always descended into a moral panic about the fact that women read romance novels. They were doing it on YouTube way before TikTok existed, and on forums before that, and through letters to the editor of literary magazines before that, and (I imagine) via carrier pigeon before that… 

Somewhere in between these two types of comments sits the third: “there are bigger problems in the world, you know”.

from a random TikTok comment section

Of course I know all of these things. I know that there are more important things going on in the world, and that my video is not the first time a person has tackled a specific topic. I’m pretty sure the commenters themselves know that I know, but they still can’t help themselves from trying to deliver a passive aggressive jab. 

This is one of the annoying things about “it’s not that deep” comments. They try so hard to appear nonchalant, unlike the explicit hate comment. The “not that deep” commenter knows that leaving plain mean comments would make them look insane, and because they consider themselves above direct insults, they opt for detached condescension. But there’s nothing well-meaning about it. They want to deride and discourage as much as the overt bullies. 

A lot of the counter-criticism going around at the moment is that it is always that deep. I am more inclined toward the position that it is always that deep to someone. While some topics are objectively important and worth discussing again and again by as many voices as possible, I understand that not everyone will care about what the kids are saying about Kafka on TikTok as much as I do. Based on this understanding, I accept that a video about Kafka’s TikTok renaissance might not attract millions of views, but I will not accept that the video should not exist at all because “it’s not that deep”. I’m not demanding your viewership, so why are you demanding that everything I make conform to your tastes?  Also, stop commenting on my videos if you don’t want the algorithm to keep suggesting them to you.

There’s a funny little paradox in telling a content creator that their post is stupid and shouldn’t exist while sending signals to the algorithm gods to show you more content on the same topic. So you give more frustrated views to the topic, which in turn signals to content creators that content on this topic gets pushed by the algorithm, so more people post about the topic, which means a higher likelihood that you’ll see more of it and so on and so forth. 

In his book Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes

The constant typing and swiping on a smartphone is an almost liturgical gesture, and it has substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. The world has to accord to my desires. In this way the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through my swiping I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion ot total availability.

The algorithm, then, is there for your convenience, there to make you feel special and correct about everything™ so why do some people refuse to let it do its job? Unless of course they want to be miserable…

this is how I scroll

I know that content is designed to get your attention. As a creator, I spend more time than I would like thinking about how to make my thumbnails and titles as clickable as possible without stooping to flat out rage-baiting innocent netizens on their daily doomscroll. And as a social media user, I’ve been rage-baited countless times. It’s embarrassing really, the number of times I’ve hate-watched something, shaking my head at my laptop, or scrolled away from something muttering “why the fuck are you showing me this?” to myself. The keywords here being at my laptop and to myself. No one was actually forcing me to watch any of it. 

We have become far too comfortable being angry at content creators when the content that gets sent to us by algorithms that we train doesn’t cater to our precise needs and wants. You wouldn’t walk into a bakery and get angry at the baker for not having a rack of ribs to sell you. You would simply not enter the bakery. You can do the same on the internet. 

I did it just last week, when the Sabrina Carpenter album cover discourse was going on. After watching a couple of tiktoks about it (that came up on my for you page against my will), I decided that it was “not new” and that “there are more important things going on in the world” - in my world, at least - so I just scrolled right past every Sabrina Carpenter post I saw for the rest of the day, until eventually I didn’t see any anymore.

One of the most widely criticised aspects of algorithmic media distribution is that it allows users to do exactly what I describe above: create echo chambers. On this one occasion, I consider my ability to create a chamber in which I don’t have to watch hundreds of people think aloud about their understanding of feminism via Sabrina Carpenter an act of self-care. 

Jokes aside, it’s sobering to experience its impact firsthand. It has fragmented the news environment and it’s eroding our ability to experience a shared reality. And, in the case of “it’s not that deep commenters”, it’s making it difficult for people to accept that there is content out there that does not cater specifically to them - to such an extent that they can’t seem to be able to click away without first making it everyone else’s problem. 

It has created an entire group of people who, despite their firm belief that “not everything needs to be a thinkpiece”, cannot bear the thought that not everything needs to be commented on by them, either.