We all judge things based on our personal experiences of them. I ran a guitar-based YouTube channel for several years before starting a second channel for keyboards, but I’ve been watching synth-based channels almost since the beginning of YouTube. And between all of the guitar-based channels and synth-based channels, I have to say that MY experience has been that the people who comment on synth-based channels are ruder and more nasty than those who comment on guitar channels, and that’s saying a lot.
It’s not uncommon for me to leave a positive (or every so often critical) comment and get attacked. I’ve never understood why. In the most recent example, I suggested that I use 16 tracks in my DAW for a drum machine and was told I was a schmuck. I responded by explaining that, by having all of the drums on separate tracks, it gives you the ability to fine tune each sound, such as adding a gated reverb to just the snare.
But that’s a pretty typical interaction. I seriously don’t know why I bother. Every channel has a comments section and every comments section has at a minimum a handful or mean, nasty, stupid, arrogant people who just want to argue. Who has time for that? I’ll explain.
When you don’t have a lot going on in your life, you give a lot of importance to whatever you do have going on. So if you, for example, love Reaper, and you don’t have any friends or any other hobbies, it makes sense that you’d defend Reaper against any possible perceived slight.
Things really boiled over when the channel “Scott’s Synth Stuff” dared to call out nasty behavior on the part of Teenage Engineering. Scott criticized two things – one he was wrong about, and he corrected the initial video, and the other he was right about. He got hundreds of nasty and threatening posts and people went so far as to find out where he lived and found an unlisted cell phone number for him. He’s quitting his channel, perhaps just for now, perhaps forever.
Naturally YouTube, who makes millions of dollars from creators like Scott, will do absolutely nothing about any situation where comments get out of control, because they literally could care less. They want to make money. Instead of nasty people getting blocked from just one channel, they should be kicked off of YouTube. But that’d cost them ad money so it won’t happen.
Fortunately I rarely post videos and my channel is teeny tiny, so I likely won’t get threatened or anything. But yeah, the “synth community” as a whole has a problem. Too many assholes. What to do about it? Nothing. But the smart people will likely leave less comments, and the comments sections will slowly get worse and worse.