YouTubers: intelligent as garden-variety tubers.

YouTube is pretty amazing. You can find a video of just about anything. You can then send the video to all your friends, and rave about how awesome it is, then they send it to their friends, and so on, and the video "goes viral."

There is an interesting phenomenon that accompanies this viral video spread. I call it the "telephone effect". Remember the game you played in kindergarten? It's like that. Every time this video gets sent from one person to the next, any information that the sender uses to introduce the video to his* friend gets (mis)read, (mis)interpreted, then (mis)remembered when the video is sent to the next person.

What's even worse, people assume things (often wrongly) about the videos, and then send these assumptions into the corrupt "telephone" system: assumptions like whether the video (or audio) is real or fake, as recorded or edited, who created the video, who wrote the music in a video, whether the video is original, or has been edited from its original form.

It's this issue of crediting the original creators that irks me the most. I can't count how many times someone has uploaded something that they put a lot of work into, then someone else takes it, puts some different music over it, and re-posts it without giving any credit to the creator. I couldn't care less about how many times a video is copied, edited, or re-posted, but come on people, just mention where you got your source material.

Add to all this the asinine comments under every single video on YouTube, and you just wonder: Who are these people, and how can they be so foolish?

Challenge: Try to leave a comment on a video that is so stupid that other YouTubers realize you are joking. It's near impossible.

* English desperately needs a neuter singular human pronoun. I often use "they," but while less awkward than "he or she," its plurality is still confusing.