I feel like I’ve established that YouTube has been the perfect gathering spot for gematria. And it’s getting even better for them despite the complaints. And “despite the complaints” might not be accurate. One of the prerequisites for being a bad ass gematria pro is being able to boldly announce that YouTube deleted your channel. Pull up a recent Gematrinator video and there’s a fair chance that you will have to put up with the intro having about a minute of music (that isn’t half bad, just too long) and the call for the Wahmbulance that his previous channel was deleted.
But in recent events, did you know this? I’ve mentioned it - YouTube has disabled the 👎 on the comments feature. I’ve used my super power of being an annoying asshole to elicit a response. Sure you can still dislike the video as a whole and I avail myself of that right often. But if you genuinely disagree with just one point you can’t even express it in what should be a totally ineffective manner. At first I just thought it was me, like they didn’t like the idea of me being the boy that cried wolf and disliking every comment. But now that I’ve engaged on all the commentary review of non gematria videos the on hands experience shows it’s a global change. Not only does my dislike not change the counter on the 👎 from 0 to 1, there’s never any 👎s at all.
You can refer to my collage from yesterday or pull up any TED Talks video from recent times and no matter how controversial the topic or the comment is there are absolutely zero 👎. This only facilitates the cognitive bias that nobody dislikes whatever is being said. And while a Dan video might pull in 500 views and two dozen comments the TED videos have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands views with a proportional increase in comments. With human nature being what it is the thought that nobody wanted to dislike a comment somewhere along the way is silly. Maybe there’s a setting to disable disliking comments. Otherwise I can’t think of why the icon even exists as it serves no useful function.
Which means that if you want to express your disgust you have to actually express it in a comment of your own. (Don’t you think that someone who just took the time to rebut your comment would also take two seconds to click 👎?) Now that I spent an additional $4.99 for added f-bombs this month. People are pretty fucking lazy. A lot of disagreement goes unseen by never taking the time to post a reply. But here’s the big difference between a TED or other neutral site like the others I visited recently. They don’t care about, don’t have time or are also really fucking lazy and don’t want to babysit all the comments. In a gematria video, any reply that goes against the grain no matter how nice or well thought out stands a good chance of being deleted by the author of the video.
Roomie from yesterday’s post might not ever get to see a comment like “Gematria doesn’t work because they are finding statistically inconsequential matches reported after the event that can easily be duplicated by any event on any given day”. Which is true. And if someone posts, “Roomie, you’re a blithering idiot for thinking this!”, that will stay up because TROLL ALERT! The alarm bell goes off and then they get to respond to the less well worded criticism with cries of , “Learn gematria, it’s undeniable!” Or the all to often, “Shut up, shill faggot”.
There’s a cognitive bias to the newcomer. Everything about gematria is cool, nothing is bad. I think you can see why I blog about it instead of trolling. If I thought that my comment would last long I would take up their spurious offers to debate the finer points of 113 meaning dishonest, while using other elisions or number alteration methods they accept like prime numbers to show that TRUTH = DISHONEST.
There are a variety of personalities involved here. Some are fully aware that they are using gematria to propose whatever they want. Maybe racism, maybe some gun rights, maybe some narcissistic attention seeking. Lots of reasons unsaid. There are those that genuinely think it works that never get to see the other side of the con (not a typo) as first of all their system is designed to win by producing any number you want and making a big deal about it and it’s all one big happy family. With cookies. Lots and lots of cookies. All the way along nobody can even put a simple 👎 on your comment. I think it would be interesting if the playing field were leveled that the video author could not delete unwanted comments. But of course that won’t happen and shouldn’t since the troll abuse would be tremendous. Still, it says a lot about the character of someone who deletes a well written criticism instead of having the courage to stick up for his beliefs. (Reference: Most Hated, The Deleted Comment post here where I got the screen shot of a comment I correctly identified was going to be deleted).
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