Mark Slutsky describes his absorbing website, Sad YouTube, as being comprised of “[m]oments of melancholy, sadness and saudade from the lives of strangers, gleaned from the unfairly maligned ocean of YouTube comments.” In an interview, he expands on why he started the site and what might be its deeper meaning:
How did the idea for the site come? Was there a crystallizing moment? How long have you been running the site?
For a long time, I had noticed that there was something … else going on in the YouTube comment section. Something besides the usual racism, insults, obscure shout-outs and general noise.
Particularly on videos of old songs (either legitimate music videos or fan-uploaded audio tracks with slide shows or home-made clips accompanying the music), people had been leaving little stories. Memories they associated with the music, stories with such touching specificity and seeming honesty that they stood out among all the other comments. It intrigued, and honestly, delighted me in a perverse way, that in that part of the Internet universally acknowledged as the garbage heap of our civilization, I was finding such moments of beauty.
I knew that these comments were ephemeral; they’d either be driven so far down the page by the “bad” ones that no one would ever find them, or the video they were associated with would be deleted—either way, they’d be lost. So I started Sad YouTube in the fall of 2012 to preserve them.
You write, “I almost feel like you could write a Studs Terkel oral history of America culled entirely from YouTube comments on pop songs.” That’s fascinating. Could you talk a bit about that? What’s the value of an oral history? What can it capture or dramatize that others documents cant?
There’s a truth to oral histories that you don’t find anywhere else. You get stories, details and emotions you don’t find in any other form of history. Very few of the comments I’ve chosen tell stories significant or dramatic enough, at least from the outside, to make it into the news, let alone the history books. But each one conveys something about what it felt like to be alive at the time. Or what it feels like to be alive at all.
The Dish 