Sad YouTube.

People Linking to Buzzfeed is horrendously lazy, but sometimes it can be rather wonderful and notable and so why not? Mark Slutsky is the author of a blog Sad YouTube in which he visits the comments under YouTube videos looking for meaningful stories. As he says:

"The YouTube comment section may be the world’s biggest information trash heap, but where do archeologists go when they’re trying to understand the lives and ways of ancient civilizations? They look in their garbage. Sad YouTube is just one lone garbage picker strolling through mountains of detritus. It takes time to pick through it, but the rewards are glorious. And what’s so fascinating is that YouTube has accumulated all this wealth seemingly without ever realizing that it’s there. For a company so focused on the uses of Big Data, Google seems totally unaware of the human and narrative gold mine they possess in YouTube’s comments section, and I fear they’ll just get rid of it altogether one day like they did Google Reader, Google Wave, or a million other projects whose uses weren’t obvious."

It's a lengthy post but well worth spending time with as he finds a kind of mass memory for pop culture hidden between the snark and flaming.