YouTube Trolls Power Insult-Generating Search Engine

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Cat Insults

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YouTube is pretty great, but YouTube commenters? Not so much. For every smart, insightful, useful comment below a YouTube video, there are usually 25 trolls either talking about genitalia, belittling the content or belittling those smart, insightful, useful commenters.

Chicago-based web developer Adrian Holovaty has put all that negativity to (relatively) good use with the YouTube Insult Generator, a website that lets you cull insults from commenters with a simple search.

Here’s how it works: A certain number of people always “Dislike” a YouTube video, and fans of the video make fun of those dislikers for having bad taste or just being jerks. The Insult Generator finds these responses to the dislikers and fits it into the site’s search bar, using YouTube’s API. The results you get are like comebacks against people who don’t like the search term.

Holovaty admits the system isn’t perfect, but check out some of the results above for an idea of when it does work. The Insult Generator may just be a bit of fun, but it’s also a glimpse into the patterns of YouTube commenters. Fun social experiment? Useless diversion? What do you make of Holovaty’s project?

Image courtesy of Flickr, Trevor Coultart

More About: Search, Social Media, trolls, YouTube

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