The 6 Types of YouTubers

As I work as a freelance graphic designer, and I work from home, I spend more time on YouTube than the average person.

Some of the videos on YouTube are hilarious or mind blowing or whatever. Sometimes, however, I find the comments to be equally entertaining. The anonymity of YouTube ensures that any viewer or poster can say anything with almost no consequence.

I have had a think about it and noticed there are at least 6 distinctive types of YouTubers. And here they are.

1. The Authority on Everything


One of the more annoying types. This person takes great pride in either correcting someone's spelling & grammar - or just pasting Wikipedia facts into the comments box as claiming the knowledge as their own.

I imagine this sort of person to be the type to think that living in the World of Warcraft or Second Life gives them actual life experience and qualifies them to have an opinion on almost anything. They probably attended university for 20 years before realising that entering the workforce was probably way too hard. They'd have to attend an interview first and have no actual social skills and are allergic to sunlight so can't leave the house. The furthest they get to leaving their fantasy worlds is logging onto YouTube and gracing us with their pasted facts written in perfect English. After all, if they're going to correct somebody, they better make sure they use correct grammar - despite the fact that they omit vowels and ignore the shift key when conversing with their online geek buddies.

2. The raging illiterate cage fighter


Irritating, but potentially very amusing if not directed at yourself. This person makes up for their lack of basic English skills by filling in the blanks with any one of 5 or 6 favourite "space filling words". Within one sentence littered with very colourful single-syllable words, this user has the unique gift of mocking your race, religion, location, body shape, sexuality and even your mother's occupation. There is never any substance to their insults - but if you ever respond in a similar manner you promptly receive notice that they are in fact a cage fighter who would have been the greatest ever, if not for being shot by police after beating over 50 bikers senseless in a bar fight when they were 15.

There is a good chance this person probably is an angry, violent person in reality - but anyone who spends that much time on the internet without managing to increase their vocabulary probably isn't an enormous threat to your, or your mother's, welfare.


3. The unrelenting spammer



They probably make up about 80% of all videos on YouTube. They either repost something that has had a huge view count, hoping to get their own view count, or they post A STILL IMAGE and give it the title of a video you really wanted to see.

For example:
Video title: UFC 109 Randy Couture V Mark Coleman FULL FIGHT
Video content: A jpeg of Randy Couture with the caption of "go to freefightvideos.tv!"

I don't want to go to freefightvideos.tv. I want to stay on YouTube and watch UFC 109. Why do i have to sift through 15 pages of spam from your various accounts before I realise the video is not available?

Another type of spammer is the spam commenter.

Example:
Video title: Funny cat sings the national anthem
Spammer comment: This is funny. For more like this visit www.free-ipods.cn

Annoying. Maybe the most annoying part is the fact that people still fall for it - so it works - so it keeps happening. Nobody on YouTube wants the best for you. They have no reason to supply you with infinite singing cats.

4. The approval seeking parrot


Truly the most pathetic of all users. Even the spammer has more purpose than the parrot. This is the user who quotes dialogue from a 10 second long video YOU JUST SAW and hopes that, in return, you will give him a thumbs up - so he can build up enough confidence to one day finish his screenplay for the new hilarious sitcom he's been working on since last night. It's going to be epic - like a cross between "How I Met Your Mother" and "Two and a Half Men" only set in 2050 when there are only 3 guys left on the planet. And they live in New York. And one of them runs a pizza shop.

Seriously though - if that's YOU quoting dialogue I just heard, please stop it. I was already well aware of which parts were funny - according to me, not you.

5. The epic time waster




Often stay at home mothers. I'm talking about a 58 second long poor quality, shaky video of their bog-standard domestic pet cat stalking a bird. The cat never catches the bird, by the way. There is nothing to look forward to in this video. No humour, no irony, no action, no climax and the resolution is the camera phone running out of memory.

An example of the unfortunate crossover between the epic time waster and the parrot would be a malnourished effeminite black-haired teenager with one visible eye and a Ramones T-Shirt videoing their awful rendition of their favourite song. Nobody needs to see that. Please stop naming your videos after the name of the song you're about to butcher.

6. The troll

Basically, a troll is someone who comments on a video with the sole purpose of annoying the other viewers.

For example:
Video title: The Best of British Comedy
Troll Comment: "British comedy SUCKS. American is better! British have bad teeth!!!1!

So very, very annoying. You can't read this without responding. This is where the cage fighters are born. Trolls, for whatever reason, get their kicks from knowing they have made every single other viewer RAGE. Sometimes it goes a bit further and racist or just plain distasteful comments are left. That's a crossover between the cage fighter and the illiterate troll. If there was a way to remove those people from YouTube altogether, the world would be a better place. Also, if you do comment on their lack of purpose in life, they will private message you death threats. You can get into full scale warfare with a troll within 5 messages and they will probably post something gross on your profile comments page as that's really their only method of attack.

I can't think of any image to use for this - aside from a boring screenshot, so here is a brilliant video from Trolls 2 for you to enjoy.



So there we have it - the 6 types of YouTubers, from my observation.

Please do not tell me I forgot any. I don't care.