It might surprise you to know (but shouldn't) that I don't have a YouTube channel. So uninterested in having a channel am I that the only reason I know this is because it has thwarted me in the past when I have been most tempted to write a comment on a video. My YouTube experience is that of an addict. Most videos I quietly watch (frequently double speed if it's not music) and move on. But every now and then, something moves or irritates or arouses me in a way that compels me to want to express myself, but merely attempting to like or dislike a comment on a video, let alone compose one, is something that requires a channel, which (for those of you not paying attention) I do not have. As fiery as my passions can be, they have never been too fiery to perform the quid of creating a channel for the quo of commenting on or liking or hating a comment on a video. But YouTube comments have a hold on the part of my soul that is YouTube addict. In my daily YouTube excursions, I often find myself trying to get into the head of a person who having viewed the video I just watched is compelled to lift their fingers from their laps to record for the benefit of strangers for all time whatever flits through their brains. I'm already ascribing more to the person than I could possibly know. For all I know DaveinDubuque69 had been stewing about the video for a week before finally carving out the slice of time required to type: "This is everything."
In defense of the proposition that the YouTube commentariat might not be collectively constructing the finest of human thought, has it escaped your attention that there is a sameness to the preponderance of comments? Given the predictability of so much of YouTube commentary, I've begun to suspect that it's a case of Pavlovian classical conditioning-- the stimulus is the moving image with sound, the response a limited number of stereotyped phrases: "First." "Who's watching this in 2024?" "I am so here for this.". "Gentlemen of taste, we meet again." "Everything was so much better then." I've noticed in the past year or two a couple of new categories. The first seems to be provoked by vintage performance of female artists. "Not a tattoo or a purple hair on her." And the ubiquitous "Underrated!"
For a while I've been logging every time I've come across "Underrated" by itself or in a phrase (usually "This is so underrated!" or "Criminally underrated!") in a YouTube comment. In the past month I've seen the word used to describe the following (these are just the videos where I encountered the phrase spontaneously or where I remembered to check the comments):
Pixie's song Here Comes your Man
Pixies Guitarist Joey Santiago ("must be the most underrated ever.")
Pixies Drummer Guitarist Bassist and Songwriters. (The comment got over 2000 likes and inspired the comment: "Most underrated comment")
1959 sci-fi flick (and MST3K episode) Teenagers from Outer Space
The Netflix series Love and particularly Claudia O'Doherty (possibly true)
Gillian Jacobs
Bow Wow Wow (the song was Aphrodisiac)
Melissa Villaseñor on Stephen Colbert
New Mexico (the state)
We Both Reached for the Gun (from Chicago)
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Humphrey Bogart classics Petrified Forest, The Harder They Fall, The Caine Mutiny, The Desperate Hours, In.a Lonely Place
Swedish singer Robyn -- criminally
Martin Short
Regina Spektor's I Cut Off My Hair
"Listen do you smell something?" line from Ghostbusters
Goldfrapp
Also observed in the course of gathering the above:
- Charlyne Yi's outfit for her impression of a turtle on Conan is "underappreciated".
- Bad news for Jamie Farr: Teenagers think he is overrated.
"Underrated" is an outside-the-box adjective for something you like. Taken at face value it's an objective datum about a thing-- an assertion that the ratings for it are low, which assumes that there are ratings about it, the amplitude of which can be evaluated. Moreover, there is a judgment about the amplitude; to wit that it is excessively low. Interestingly enough, there are indeed ratings that can be applied to YouTube videos. Having watched a video, anyone (even those of us without channels) can take an extra step and register either a Like or a Dislike. Could "underrated" refer to the ratio of Likes to Dislikes? Maybe once, but Dislike counts are no longer public information on YouTube videos, yet if anything the characterization of a video or its subject as underrated has mushroomed in recent years. Could it sometimes refer to the ratio of likes to views-- an indication that the commenter considers, given the number of views, that not enough viewers have hit the Like button? Perhaps, but in my unscientific evaluation of this possibility with the videos whose views and likes I noted above, there does not appear to be any great consistency-- the ratios range from 0.06% to 7.54%. It also can't be a reliable datum because whereas individuals can rack up dozens of views, they are only allowed one like per video (per sock puppet account). I certainly don't "Like" every video I come across that I "like". Furthermore, plenty of enterprises exist out there that will sell content creators jacked up Like counts for a price.
All of this is a bit beside the point if my suspicion about the popularity of "underrated" is correct, namely that it stands in as an objective sounding rationale for an imprimatur that the user is intending to confer upon a favorite video or its subject matter. If the comment has any basis in numerical data, perhaps it's an assertion that a video does not have enough views-- single or repeat. I can't help but feel that the word does a lot of work for the commenter-- elevating their own appreciation to a precious status in contrast to the expected derelict neglect of a work of art by the unwashed masses. *
There's an unintentional backhanded quality to the word, however. Marina Diaminidis-- formerly of Marina and the Diamonds, lately of Marina-- was puzzled by how frequently "underrated" is used by her fans to describe her, saying "How big do you want me to be?
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* I suppose for thoroughness's sake, I shouldn't rule out the possibility that the frequency with which I encounter the adjective "underrated" is a function of my taste for actually underrated things.
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