Checkpoints

Drew Austin has two beliefs about YouTube com­ments:

that much of the best music crit­i­cism actu­ally lives in YouTube com­ments, and that YouTube com­ments are not nearly as awful as people say they are.

I agree with both — Mark Slutsky’s Sad YouTube is a mon­u­ment to the moving, melan­choly com­ments on music videos — and, reading Drew, I thought again about the sub­cul­ture of “check­point” com­ments.

I only learned about these recently, thanks to Kicks Condor’s internet exploration. When a YouTube video is deter­mined a suit­able haven for check­points, its com­ment sec­tion is, by mutual agree­ment, no longer “about the video” but instead a shared space for brief, diaristic reflec­tion.

Here’s an example com­ment:

Checkpoint: Not too long ago, I grad­u­ated from Com­mu­nity Col­lege with an as­so­ciates degree. It’s not like I don’t enjoy what the degree covers (being Dig­ital Media) but the only reason I got said degree was because I was unsure of what I wanted to do with my life after High School. [ … ]

I’m going to keep trying my best and use this com­ment as a time capsule, to when I’m finally suc­cessful and actu­ally able to, at bare minimum, sur­vive off of what I make; I can look back and think of how far I’ve come.

There are many more examples, spread across many more videos, and some are very compelling, but — this is interesting — I feel weird quoting (in effect, republishing) them here, so I’m not going to do so. I truly just dis­cov­ered that inhibition, my fin­gers hov­ering over command-C, and it says a lot, I think, about the pow­erful feeling that somehow swirls up out of these spaces.

Here is a much-visited check­point video; you can explore it for yourself.

The use of “check­point” here is an allusion, I believe, to the feeling of playing a JRPG (the vast JRPG … of life) in which you’ve just slogged through a dan­gerous sec­tion, maybe only barely surviving, and then you come, by surprise, to a peaceful space — a little town, an oasis — where you can save your game. (This is opaque to people who haven’t played JRPGs, I know, so just trust me when I tell you: it’s a very good feeling!)

It’s impor­tant to say that barely any of these com­menters visit these videos intentionally — at least not the first time. Instead, they are deliv­ered to them by YouTube’s rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithm. This seems key to the whole feeling: the sense of wan­dering in the forest, and then, ah, is that a light up ahead … ?

The rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithm’s “participation” gives rise to a recur­ring sense of the mys­tical in the com­ments. I don’t know why the algo­rithm brought me here, but … 

I was chat­ting about these videos with a few internet acquaintances, and someone pro­posed (I’m paraphrasing) that it is pre­cisely the inconvenience of the system that makes the activity appealing. You can’t “subscribe” to anyone’s check­points; you can’t search through them; you can hardly even sort them! So, the base­line expe­ri­ence is to see a check­point once, and never again. There is, perhaps, safety in that; an invitation.

(YouTube’s refusal to pro­vide a com­ment search engine is very interesting. Think about how much that omis­sion would change Twitter — for the better, I think!)

Without any of the tra­di­tional pub­licity mechanisms, every­thing depends on “foot traffic”. You could post an unsearchable, unsortable check­point on a custom web­site … and no one would ever read it. Attaching it to a YouTube video — even an obscure one — feels, perhaps, like writing a mes­sage on a wall in a crowded city. You are basi­cally assured that, eventually, someone will pass by and read it; you are like­wise assured that you won’t know who they are, nor they you.

I shouldn’t totally ignore the actual con­tent of these videos, which is very often the kind of wistful JRPG music that, when you play those games, burns itself into your brain, and becomes, for many, a potent cue for nostalgia. I like the way the videos “set the tone” for these spaces; some­body could write a whole aca­d­emic paper about the inter­ac­tion here of music, writing, ~vibe~, and more.

So! If I had to summarize, I’d say we are looking at an arch­i­pelago of social spaces where some “missing” fea­tures have cre­ated pleasant lacunae — their very absence sup­porting some­thing new and interesting. Tell that to the product managers.

Ear­lier this year, many of the most pop­ular check­point videos were taken down: found at last by YouTube’s copy­righted music hunter-killer algo­rithm, car­casses deliv­ered proudly to Nin­tendo. (I always wonder, did Nin­tendo even care before get­ting the alert from YouTube? It’s one of those strange com­pul­sory corporate-legal sit­u­a­tions in which they “have to” care, even though they don’t, not really — not even in the most van­ish­ingly com­mer­cial sense … )

Happily, the videos had been archived in antic­i­pa­tion of this day. Here’s one of the all-time greats. If you change the word “videos” in that URL to “com­ments”, you can browse the attached check­points, also archived. (You’ll see, in this one, a stronger com­mit­ment to the conceit, with more check­pointers con­cluding their com­ment with some­thing like: “Game saved: Sunday, July 18, 10:00 a.m.”)

Check­points taken one at a time are nothing special: art­less reports of 21st-century life. For me, it’s the mutual agree­ment that’s interesting, and the very pal­pable “places”, the magic circles, these com­menters have cre­ated together.

Here, I will over­come my reluc­tance to quote them, because I want to share a kind of com­ment that seems to encap­su­late the check­point expe­ri­ence:

This video showing up in my news­feed for the first time an entire year and a half ago was, undoubtedly, the start of a major turn­around in my life. I hope it was for many others.

This phe­nom­enon relates, in the whorls of my imagination, to my recent ques­tions about Discord, which were premised, I’ll remind you, on this impulse:

When­ever I think about ~social infrastructure~ related to the Society of the Double Dagger, I think about tap­ping into the expe­ri­ence, erudition, and sen­si­tivity of the group of people who receive these emails. Like: I am able to ask ques­tions of this group, and it’s an enor­mous asset; a privelege. It might be cool if the group could do the same!

A while back, in an email to a friend, I wrote:

Honestly, about once a month, I feel it rising again: the cold cer­tainty that I am, eventually, going to have to pro­gram my own mini micro social plat­form, because every­thing that already exists bums me out.

But it’s interesting: the appeal of these check­point videos is pre­cisely the fact that they are NOT designed. This sub­cul­ture has repur­posed a plot of unloved YouTube real estate and totally turned it around, charged it up with emo­tional energy, all without changing a single line of JavaScript or CSS. So, maybe the deep lesson of the check­point isn’t “make it like this!” but “don’t MAKE it at all”.

Some com­ments, as usual, from newsletter subscribers.

Here is Mau­r­izio with a stun­ning image:

When I first read your post, I had imme­diate visions of the scary zombie-like infected in The Last of Us. Of course, they’re infected, decrepit beings, but on these walking man­i­fes­ta­tions of hideousness, beau­tiful organic growths began to appear, an assembly of graces on top of the frightful. In this case, the infected are tra­di­tional YouTube com­ments (the kind we all know so well and try so hard to zoom past), and these check­points are the flow­ering hope of humanity just begin­ning to bloom on the surface.

Here’s a reflec­tion from Joe:

I really love your obser­va­tion about the mys­ti­cism of “I don’t know why the algo­rithm brought me here … ” Even though I have never stum­bled upon a check­point video before now, that sen­ti­ment of algo­rithmic fate has popped up in so many video com­ment sec­tions I’ve seen, but I haven’t stopped to think about how strange of an idea that is.

Some­times when I want to listen to a song that really hits home, I’ll go to YouTube instead of Spotify, just to scroll through the com­ments and expe­ri­ence some sort of com­mu­nion with everyone else who res­onated with the song. It feels like entering a room where we are all lis­tening together.

Videos like these feel like a refuge, but I some­times wonder if they would work quite the same way in an envi­ron­ment where there isn’t a tor­rent of stuff to seek refuge from. The algo­rithm that makes the white water rapids is the same one that serves up these eddies. If YouTube as a plat­form is a river, what would a pond be?

Here’s an obser­va­tion from Cory:

There’s some­thing really beau­tiful not just in the check­point itself but in the pon­der­ings it prompts: “Where am I at now? Where do I want to be? Is this the begin­ning of some­thing new and I don’t even know it yet?” And so there is also some­thing beau­tiful in that cama­raderie of thought. The thought that prompts the thought, and so on.