Stranger things...in comments
Wide Weird World
Internet is weird and I love it.
When I started posting videos, I assumed that if people commented, they would comment on the videos. The camera. The editing. The storytelling. Things that were actually present in the content. What I didn’t anticipate was that many people would use the comment section as an opportunity to reveal something about themselves instead.
A few weeks ago I made a video where I was pretending to talk to my mother. At one point she “tells” the audience to follow me. It was a joke. Not particularly sophisticated. Not even one of my better jokes. Yet one of my favorite comments to this day is the one you’ll see below.
The longer I make videos, the more I notice that people don’t really watch content objectively. They bring themselves into it. Their experiences, insecurities, memories, assumptions, and occasionally complete misunderstandings.
For example, in one video I deliberately pointed at bright red text and confidently referred to it as yellow. The joke seemed obvious enough to me. What followed was several days of people sincerely questioning whether they were becoming colorblind. One comment in particular made me laugh so hard that I had to save it.
This is when I started realizing that the audience isn’t passively consuming content. They’re participating in it. They’re filling in the blanks. They’re arguing with it. Sometimes they’re arguing with things that aren’t even there.
Which brings me to perhaps my favorite example. I once made a video about text colors. That’s it. Typography. A thrilling topic if you’re a designer and a completely harmless one if you’re not. At one point I explained that black text would look worse in a particular example.
Somehow this resulted in the following comment.
I spent a few minutes wondering how exactly a discussion about typography had evolved into an accusation of racism. Then I remembered where I was.
The internet is the only place on earth where thousands of people can watch the same 30-second video and leave with thousands of completely different interpretations of what happened. One person sees a joke. Another sees an insult. One person thinks you’re intelligent. Another thinks you’re an idiot. A third person thinks you’re secretly part of a conspiracy that neither of you knew existed ten minutes earlier.
The last one below remains my favorite of all times.
The comment says:
“What AI tool are you using?”
And I replied:
“Believe it or not… I’m just changing clothes.”
That’s such a perfect example of people not seeing what is actually happening in front of them. They’re seeing what they’ve already decided must be happening.
And that’s probably the weirdest side effect of visibility. People don’t become emotionally attached to the creator. They become emotionally attached to their interpretation of the creator.
The good news is that some of those interpretations are hilarious. 🤣
Next time I will share how you can make your video cinematic with 3 easy ways.
Consider this your warning.
Warmly,
AL.
