Guide to The Comments Section
Introduction
We’ve all heard the phrase, “The first rule of the internet is: Never read the comments.”
People usually assume that every comment section is going to be an antagonistic, angry place filled with political squabbles and insults. And for a lot of content creators, the comments can be a huge source of anxiety. What if people are mean? What if they don’t like the content? Deliberately subjecting yourself to potential criticism from thousands of people you’ve never met can be scary.
But if you want to build a successful community around your product, ideas, and your brand, that’s exactly what you should do.
When you read and participate in the comments sections on your content as frequently and intentionally as you can — especially if you’re deliberately setting the right tone and keeping your own emotions in check — you’re signaling to everyone else that you not only care what they have to say, but also that you’re not just some faceless automaton cranking out videos. You’re a real person who isn’t afraid to engage with your fans and critics directly.
And the better you represent yourself, the more likely your viewers are to participate and engage in the comments as well, which in turn, means that social media algorithms will recognize the increased engagement and share your content with even more people, helping you grow your audience more quickly over time.
This guide will help you better understand how and why you should always read the comments.
Community vs. Communication
Before we get into the best reasons why you should pay attention to the comments on your content, we first need to discuss the massive difference between building an actual “community”, and simply doing “communication”.
The most essential difference is that community is inherently multidirectional, involving multiple parties all participating in conversation and influencing each other simultaneously, whereas communication is essentially broadcasting messages to other people in one direction. In short, it’s talking vs. listening.
Listening > Talking
If you’re just broadcasting, then you're making a video and posting it online — or you’re distributing it via television or some streaming service, and off it goes. People watch it or they don't. It's one-way.
But social media is not television. From the very beginning when people used to talk about Web 2.0, the whole idea was that the Internet suddenly gave us the power to talk to each other.
It's no longer the case of CBS, ABC, NBC, or some cable channel putting out a show that gets piped into your living room, where you watch it, feel some way about it, then go to bed, and that's it.
If you’re creating content online, you are not — or at least, you don't have to be — a “broadcaster.” You can actually foster multidirectional communication by participating in the community. And there are a lot of really good reasons to do just that.
Why Build a Community Online?
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Let's say you've got a relatively “viral” video that’s already accumulated 100,000 views. The more you engage with people in the comments, the more that video keeps circulating in people's feeds. Every time you leave another comment, and every time somebody else leaves a comment and you reply to it, the video pops up in their friend's feeds as well.
Replying to comments and participating in the community is going to increase your brand awareness quite a bit. You can keep a video live, and ongoing, for quite a lot longer than you probably imagine, just by interacting with people online in the comments.
2. Build Credibility & Trust With Your Target Audience
Engaging with your customers directly means that you can learn more about them from them. You can ask people questions, you can listen to them when they complain, and you can get critical feedback about your messaging, your products, and your services. This is essentially free market research.
3. Get Critical Feedback
Talking with your audience directly and participating in an online community in the comments can lead to you getting immediate and legitimate feedback about your messaging, products, and services in real time
This can be tough for a lot of people. Nobody likes negative feedback. They don't want to get told that their product is bad or that somebody hates them online. This causes most people to avoid the comments. But there's a lot that you can get from critical feedback, if only just to revise your messaging, so that the next time the thing or point that outraged some of the people, who are maybe fans in other cases, doesn’t make them experience the same outrage a second time.
Even if the comments are not nice, it's important to read them because they represent a lot of people who are giving you critical feedback. Yes, maybe they're being rude or just overly harsh with their comments, but there's still kernels of truth in their feedback that can help you.
4. Improve Your Ability to Spot Trends
For the most part, people who spend their time talking with other people online — including those who do so anonymously — are telling you their genuine opinions.
There are occasionally trolls, but for the most part, people are actually starting conversations about things because they care about them. And other people will continue those conversations because they care as well. Paying attention to what people are talking about can help you see where the culture is headed.
Take a series like Game of Thrones, the first season, for example. As a TV show, it gained a following as people started to discuss it on the Internet. Social media platforms helped the show gain an audience because of the spontaneous and organic conversations it was generating online. It’s an example of how every one of us who's used any social media platform has suddenly encountered something that was trending that maybe we didn't know anything about before.
It’s important to keep an eye out for the influencers, previously called mavens, as they are the ones who are leading these online, seemingly spontaneous and organic conversations. If you can learn to spot these folks, you can spot the trends.
5. Gain an “Owned Audience”
The goal is to help you cultivate your own audience. Ultimately, you want all of these people off of Facebook and into your inbox, directly connected to your organization. You actually want their email addresses and their business link.
But building a community online is the first step in how to actually create these opportunities.
How to Create Connections
In some sense, “creating connections” is impossible. You cannot force people to talk to each other, let alone to actually get along and form bonds with other people. But what you can do is foster an environment that encourages conversation and connection.
And in order to be successful at this, you must first understand yourself — because it will only work to the extent that the way you present yourself and your ideas comes across 1) authentic and done in good-faith; and 2) a natural extension of your values, goals, and specific areas of expertise.
Consider for a moment how you judge other people’s brands and social accounts.
My guess is that, like most people, you can instinctively recognize when someone is making statements that they don’t really believe, solely for attention. I’m sure you’ve also been confused when brand accounts and even individual influencers jump into conversations about subjects that seem to bear no relationship to anything they’re actually known for.
What’s harder to see is how often people who are trying to attract a particular audience speak about topics that are uninteresting and irrelevant to those people, using a tone and language they find entirely off-putting.
I’m going to assume that you really want to be effective at attracting the right people, so to be clear: You do not want to make that mistake.
Fortunately, Return on Ideas has a helpful tool that you can use to think about who you are and how you can authentically convey your ideas to the people you most need to influence.
The ROI Brand Framework
An important way we think about marketing at ROI is that the most effective strategies will meet at the intersection of your brand's credibility and audience’s interests, coupled with the right messaging, distributed on the right channels..
In other words, we care about why you're communicating with people, who you're communicating with (e.g. the audience), and how you're communicating with them (i.e., the methods of distribution, specifically which platforms you are using).
Finding and effectively managing that intersection is where we think your best work is always going to be done.
ROI offers a comprehensive Appraisal service to help our clients understand these concepts and learn how to apply them in their own business, but you can do this yourself by first thinking clearly about who you are and who you need to talk to and persuade in order to achieve your mission, and then developing a strategy for presenting your message to those people in terms that they recognize and understand, on the platforms and forums they’re actually using.
Once you’ve gathered enough clarity about your goals and strategies, you’re going to need to create content that you have good reason to believe will resonate with your target audience at a bunch of different levels of complexity — attracting profits with the simplest and most broadly appealing content, while giving subscribers, super-fans, and even your most loyal evangelists more complex content that they can dive deeper into as they become more and more excited about your brand.
Engagement Mountain
The marketing funnel is often used to describe a customer’s journey from awareness to engagement and conversion. However, a funnel works by gravity, it is passive. A funnel is something where if you fill it up to the top, a lesser amount, but a consistent drip will fall out the bottom.
That is not how marketing works. Marketing is hard work, and people do not just naturally convert from prospects to buyers without guidance. That’s why, instead, we like to invert the standard “funnel” concept, and think of being a marketer like being a sherpa, helping people ascend a mountain.
You are guiding people up an actually pretty difficult road and asking them to make choices multiple times along the way to continue engaging with you, working with your brand, giving you a bigger opportunity to sell them on your brand, and/or ultimately paying you money.
You are bringing people up to the peak.
With the Engagement Mountain concept, what most marketers would call the “wide end of the funnel”, we see as just the base. And just like the base of any mountain, there are innumerable pathways that a climber can take to start their journey to the summit.
You will probably use wide-reaching digital advertising and popular content to reach the widest possible base of Prospects, but it is engagement through your main brand and sub-brands across multiple social media platforms at each stage of the journey that will build your community.
Community at Every Stage of the Journey
In order to be a good sherpa, you’re going to have to make it as easy as possible for your audience to steadily increase the depth of their connection to your brand. This means creating a cohesive network of content designed to appeal to people at each level of engagement.
Prospects are people who are not yet part of your fan-base, but who might be if they’re given a compelling reason to. You should assume that prospects have never heard of you and know little to nothing about your ideas or your products.
If your mission is to spread specific ideas, when talking to Prospects, you should avoid using any insular jargon or other idiosyncratic terminology, and make sure that you write and speak in simple, easily accessible language. You should also make sure that you’re not overloading people with complexity right away.
Remember that these are people who don’t know or care about you… Yet.
So, just as you would not immediately launch into a high-level rant about ideas you’ve spent decades studying when first meeting someone at a cocktail party, you shouldn’t do the equivalent in your messaging content — and you should remember this when you’re talking to people in the comments section on your content as well. It’s extremely important to know who you’re talking to and how much they already know about your brand and products, as that will determine how best to communicate with them.
As individual audience members become more familiar with your content and demonstrate their interest by subscribing to your channels (ie. Subscribers) and becoming paying customers (ie. Super-fans & Evangelists), the complexity of your content and the language you use in conversation with them will naturally increase. Although you should usually still err on the side of simplicity.
Either way, in order to foster community in the comments section, your directive is to participate in conversation with your audience, wherever it’s taking place.
For content that is designed to appeal to the wide base of Prospects, you should engage people's concerns and criticisms with calm replies and rebuttals, and also acknowledge people's praise and thank them for watching. You should also start encouraging folks to become Subscribers.
With Subscribers, the next thing to do with your social media channels is to create VIP opportunities for increased connection with interested people using private groups, Memberships, SubscribeStar, Patreon, etc. and start encouraging your top fans to ascend to the next stage and become paying supporters.
Facebook, Discord, or Slack are super useful for creating private groups for your Super-fans. All of these channels are ways to continue to foster community at increasingly higher levels.
And finally, at the very top of the mountain are your Evangelists — your most reliable and loyal supporters. A great way to continue fostering community with them is to host in-person events and gatherings and invite them to come interact with you directly.
Every one of these groups not only needs content created with their unique needs in mind, but the individual fans need to know you’re there with them, ready and willing to engage, if they’re going to build a thriving community around their shared interests. This is going to take some time and effort, but the great news is that the amount of time and effort starts small and grows as your channels grow, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice before you have millions of people watching.
Once you’re consistently making great content, you’ll need to regularly reply to people in the comments, so turn the notifications on on your phone and pay attention when that alert goes off.
The Rules of Engagement
One thing to remember is that every reply and comment you leave is a visible demonstration of your character and credibility. Every single thing you do, under your brand's name, and depending on how closely-knit you are to that brand, your own name as well, matters, because everybody's looking and watching.
With that in mind, here are 5 Rules of Engagement:
Directly engage in the comments and authentically get to know your customers / audience
Offer insights and value that reinforce your expertise
Be respectful, friendly, and gracious to everyone, especially your biggest fans and supporters
Engage even your harshest critics with charity and kindness, but…
Don’t feed the actual trolls
We’ve discussed engaging with comments as a way of building community. We’ve addressed looking at negative comments as a form of critical feedback that still has value. But one additional part of engagement that doesn’t often get addressed but can also be of tremendous value long-term is…
Acknowledging Praise
Consider these kinds of comments:
Positive comments are always welcome. If you're creating videos and posts that people find amusing or fun, you’ll enjoy getting “hey, that was really funny” or “I love that guy” comments. That feedback is always great, but there’s not actually much you can do with it. Positive comments feel good and may sometimes help you pinpoint what you’re doing right, but they don’t usually require any kind of thoughtful introspection or change in your behavior, and they don’t provide much opportunity for you to expand on an argument or address criticism.
That’s okay. What you can do with positive comments is make sure that everybody feels seen and appreciated in your comment section.
If someone comes by and takes the time to give actual praise, such as, “Hey, that's a really great video, I love it,” take the time right back to say, “Thank you.”
Give them a little heart reaction.
That's all you need to do quite a lot of the time with praise. It's a small but important gesture because what you're actually doing is letting people know that you're there, that you're paying attention, and that you value your audience.
Paying attention is essential to engagement and community building. We have an example here in the center screenshot of one of our favorite interactions and responses. The comment is referencing the movie, Blazing Saddles: “This immediately conjured up images of Heddy(sp) Lamarr and his plot to snatch the lands from the people of Rockridge.”
The person commenting got the name wrong in the best possible way — if you get the reference, which is a running joke that recurs throughout Blazing Saddles about everyone getting the bad guy’s name wrong.
A small detail but a perfect opportunity to engage, and it doesn't take a lot of time. It only takes a few seconds to reply, but it can have a lasting impact!
This is also an example of how having your notifications turned on on your phone can help you be responsive, but how it should not necessarily take up your entire day. Responding to comments should not become a huge imposition to you. However, you can absolutely, in a few minutes each day, single out somebody in the comment section and engage with them, joke with them, thank them and have a pleasant online exchange.
On the flip side, you must absolutely…
Respond to Critics
Some of the best and most productive conversations are going to happen when you engage people who don’t like what you’ve created. The critical and/or negative comments do contain opportunities for engagement, not just with the people you are replying to but, in a quiet way, you are also engaging with everyone else reading the comments.
There’s a wonderful scene in the film, Thank You for Smoking, where the lead character, Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart) is talking to his son about his job as a lobbyist. Naylor is explaining to his son the nature of persuasion and how to win public debates, which is the lifeblood of his profession. He proposes a hypothetical scenario where he and his son are debating the best flavor of ice cream.
At the end of the mock debate, Naylor’s son says, “But, you still didn't convince me.” Nick replies, “Because I'm not after you, I'm after them,” while pointing out into a crowd of people around them.
That's the way you need to think about your engagements with people online.
Just because the person you are immediately engaging with in the comments is not somebody that you are probably going to sway, doesn't mean you are not going to persuade anyone else. You can make a customer out of a great many people observing your interactions with that one critical person.
One simple approach to handling criticism is something media trainers generally refer to as “AEP” — Acknowledge, Empathize, and Pivot.
Start by acknowledging the criticism and if possible, try to identify some aspect that you agree with. Be as charitable as possible and do your best to steelman (as opposed to strawman) their arguments. Empathize with their frustration to whatever degree you can, even if only by accepting that they are genuinely frustrated.
But once you’ve done that, you can often pivot to another point that you want to make, as long as it addresses their criticism or makes sense in context of the discussion (remember, it’s a pivot, not a non-sequtur).
The more seamless your AEP approach feels, the more effective it will be.
On a related note, don't think you can just leave one comment and then run away. Your critics are going to come back and they're going to have more to say. So, prepare yourself. Stick with it for a minute. Keep reminding yourself that there are tons and tons more people watching the conversation, even if they’re not actually participating in it themselves. Those are the people you're actually talking to.
Fortunately for you (and them)...
You Set The Tone
Here's a very critical comment and my relatively long reply.
Got a lot of these. But look at that reaction:
“Wow, I didn't actually think you or anyone would respond. That really shows something about this channel. You care and won't ignore people. Thank you.”
This guy disagreed with me, but because I took him seriously and replied honestly and authentically, a critic was turned into a listener — if perhaps still not yet a “fan”.
That pinned comment was also pretty long. But you'll see a lot of these kinds of replies:
These are exactly the comments I most want to see:
“Thanks, you helped me realize some stuff.”
“Thanks for the thoughtful response. I will have a read at what you linked and will reconsider my thoughts after learning more on this perspective.”
The goal for nearly every video I’ve ever created is to convince people to see the world in a different way, and these are perfect examples of people doing just that. Even Zuko — the person whose negative comments and criticism started the thread — returns to say that I’d presented him with “an excellent point [he’d] never thought of.”
The next example is from a really long thread with a commenter who came in with a lot of animosity. That comment generated 142 replies from a ton of people, and every one of those people got to see the debate between me and the original commenter unfold in real time.
I kept my focus on replying in good faith with constructive and coherent arguments that directly addressed the points my interloper was making. And look at the reactions from random users who saw the conversation:
“Did I just read a nice civil debate about American politics in the comments section of a YouTube video?”
“My faith in humanity is starting to be renewed.”
“I was annoyed with you at first, but I listened through and overall agreed with your assessment.”
“Thank you for having a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you. These are important to me. These exchanges are really important to me. That was an impressively fast response and I appreciate the time that was taken. To cite the source and respond to a single comment among thousands.”
I had a similarly long thread with a commenter named Scarlet Knight:
This was a really interesting, fun conversation that started out antagonistically and ended really, really positively. At the same time, we had a troll trying to insert himself into the conversation named Yiffus.
So, throughout the thread, Scarlett and I are going back and forth and having a constructive and challenging conversation where we did not initially agree — and yet, as we're talking about all this stuff, there's this other guy sniping from the sidelines, saying stuff I mostly wouldn’t want to repeat in polite company.
But because of the tone of my conversation with Scarlett Knight, other people came to the defense of the thread to police the troll, saying things like: “Do you think your needless insults are getting you anywhere?”
“Look at Scarlett Night and FEE. They were both able to be civil and calm and actually get something out of the argument.”
I have a ton of these kinds of stories, and the lesson is that you set the tone on your own channel.
Imagine if I’d responded to who's criticizing something that I put out on the Internet with an escalation of insults. Imagine if I’d just told Scarlett Knight that I thought she was stupid and not worth my time.
What do you think the response would be?
Anyone who’s spent much time on the Internet would surely know that that approach would just escalate into a shouting match, name calling, and get worse and worse. And speaking of interactions that just get worse and worse, not all critics are engaging in good faith, which is why I would offer the following bit of caution…
Don’t Feed the Trolls.
Now, this is hardly original advice, but before you implement it, you need to understand that trolling is a specific kind of behavior. It is not simply “rudeness”, as many people seem to believe.
People can be rude while delivering compliments. People can be rude while still giving you legitimate feedback about whatever it is that you're doing. It’s only when people are unconstructive and actively trying to derail or inhibit the flow of conversation that it crosses the line into trolling.
“Remember that the impact of criticism is often not the intent of the critic, but when the intent is evil, that’s what the block button is for. And when I eat my critique, let me be able to separate out the good advice from the bitter herbs.”
— Ze Frank
It’s not just about receiving criticism. It’s also not just about being insulted by a piece of criticism, although it may be painful to read. That painful comment could be valid or it could be correct, and it could actually be something that you're doing wrong or it could be an opportunity for you to learn.
Is there something you can take away from the criticism? That's what you have to ask yourself when reading the comments. If your critic is actually responding to your content and telling you what they don’t like about it, they’re not trolling you. They’re just upset because you said something they didn’t want to hear. You should absolutely engage with that person and use their criticism as an opportunity to persuade other people that you have better answers to hard questions than the critic does.
The people you shouldn’t waste your time talking to are people who clearly have no interest in what you're selling, no interest in contributing to a reasonable conversation about what you're doing, and have offered you nothing to actually respond to.
Here are two examples of actual trolls:
The first example:
“No, you are wrong.”
Okay? What is anyone supposed to do with that comment? Wrong about what? The video that was the subject of this post was about eight minutes long. What in eight minutes was the subject matter of the video wrong about? Maybe all of it? The person commenting provides no details.
There’s nothing to respond to, so don’t bother to respond.
The second example:
“Hello, I'm Jake. I'm a troll farm employee you hired to pump up your numbers and give clearly candid 100 percent authentic comments so you can game the already broken hate-filled YouTube algorithm…”
Even though there are a lot of words, there’s still nothing useful to engage with here. It’s just someone writing a disruptive, intentionally insulting, but at least mildly amusing string of paragraphs designed to mock the video and its creator (me). Unfortunately, there's no lesson or argument to discuss. It’s just an empty comment from someone who is being intentionally disruptive. Often, people like this turn malicious when you reply, and engaging with them can turn into a game of whack-a-mole where the more you reply in good faith, the more they bounce around trying to waste your time with insults and bad-faith questions.
When faced with an actual troll, it’s usually best to ignore them. But to be clear, most critics are not “trolls” and should not be treated the same way. Overwhelmingly, responding to your critics is your best opportunity to persuade people on the fence.
Lastly…
Be Human
There are some real problems with the way a lot of brands communicate with their audiences. There are two approaches at opposite ends of the brand spectrum that I especially want to point out: One that you see a lot with huge, well-known brands, and the other with small, “solopreneurs”.
On the big brand side, attempts at community engagement tend to be so sterile that they feel inhuman, robotic, and just plain weird.
If you’ve ever tried to use social media to communicate criticism to a huge brand or giant corporation, sometimes you’ll get actual bots replying to comments. We’ve all had this experience, and I think most people are extremely frustrated when they try to speak with a representative of a company in the chat or via social posts, and the response is automated nonsense that barely connects to the issue at hand.
It’s just as bad if you're reading through the comments section on some video, and every comment gets the same soulless boilerplate reply. Every positive comment gets the same “Thank you for watching” and every critical comment has some version of: “We're sorry you've had a negative experience, but please contact our customer support line at ________ if you have any other issues.”
I hate it. You hate it, too.
It's inauthentic. It's inhuman.
It completely fails to understand that replying to comments is an opportunity for you to connect with people. Automated replies are what you’d do when you're not even trying to connect. You're literally allowing a robot to do that for you, and it doesn't work – at all.
If you’re running a large brand, then you need to invest in having social media managers who understand your brand’s tone and mission well enough to authentically respond to criticism and praise with original, unique replies that are tailored to the individual comment. You’ll see this in action with any large brand that’s actually successful on social media.
On the other hand… The “solopreneur” has a different problem, which is that they are often too human and let strangers on the Internet goad them into emotional arguments and they end up saying things they (should) regret.
I see this the most with small business owners who run restaurants or services that are normally open to the public. When someone writes a bad review of their food or table service, an overly-defensive owner will come in and rain down insults and hurtful replies to the critic, because they think they’re somehow “sticking up for” their business — when what they should be doing is graciously accepting the feedback, politely and persuasively challenging statements that are incorrect, or ignoring it entirely if it’s just trolling nonsense.
People say stupid things when they're mad. They say stupid things when they're frustrated, upset, and generally overly emotional. But, none of these people know you. They don't matter, on the one hand, right? Nothing that anybody says on YouTube can really hurt your feelings that much. You don't know who these people are, for the most part. You don't know what they're going through and you don't know what their expertise is. They could be dead wrong about literally everything. And yet, that's not your mission – to think too much about them personally. Your mission is to communicate ideas.
Focus on your mission and don't get emotionally riled up about this kind of stuff because it just doesn't matter. Take that calm, centered version of you and come back and actually have conversations that will actually give you a ton of opportunities to learn and grow.
Final Thoughts
The comments on your content are literally what make social media “social”.
The one thing that makes it different from any form of media, communication, or advertising for the last 500 years is that your audience has the power to tell you what they think of you and your work and you can reply to those people in real time.
That was never true at any point before now. Newspaper ads, billboards, TV, radio, print mailers… You name it. Every form of mass communication prior to social media has been one variety or another of broadcasting. One way.
A lot of people still make the mistake of thinking about what they’re doing on social media as broadcasting; expecting their audience to just passively consume whatever content they create and that’s it. But the internet is interactive. It’s multi-directional communication.
And the better you get at fostering lots of conversation in your comments section, the bigger and more diverse that interactive network is going to get.
So… If there's one thing I can leave you with, it’s that you are not alone in the comments.
Way more people than you imagine are usually watching and paying attention to what you're saying. Participating in conversations happening in your content’s comments section is an incredible opportunity.
There's more value per minute in replying to comments than most of the other stuff that you're probably doing. The comments section is such a great environment to learn more about your audience’s likes and dislikes, their values, and their communication style.
Ignoring the comments section is a mistake many people make, but if you can avoid that mistake, you’re going to be a step ahead of your competition.
It is important how you interact with people, but if you can do it well, and if you can actually foster this kind of engagement, you can build a community in the comments.
Thank you.
Great Community-Builders
Here are a few of my favorite examples of great community builders.
Ze Frank
Ze Frank kind of being the OG for me, um, almost all of you have probably seen the Zay Frank video, although you probably don't know he was behind it, he was for Five or six years the president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, so if you've seen anything BuzzFeed has done in video form over the last decade, you've probably seen something that Ze Frank has been a part of.
But before that, he did a very early YouTube show called The Show with Ze Frank. It's one of my favorite things of all time. I've never seen, even to this day, I've never seen anyone better at building and fostering a community of people online. And so this is actually a good time for me to pause and talk a little bit about the difference between community and audience, right?
Again, I talked about it at the beginning. Audiences are passive, right? They're the people you want to hear your message, and it's important to have an audience, and it's important for you guys to be clear over your audiences. But a community is multi directional. Everybody participates. Everybody is coming up with pieces of the culture.
Everybody gets to talk. So it's not just you who gets to go out and say, these are the things that we care about as a community, and now dictatorially everybody aligns with that, right? Like, it is spontaneous order in action, right? Like, this is growth that's happening spontaneously, organically. St. Frank, I've never seen anybody better at this.
He did, so all these projects. And I have another video that I think is probably not going to play from Animate Your Dreams, but he had, he had, uh, a message board where he did, well, this is long pre Discord and, you know, pre Slack and all this kind of stuff, so he did a lot of this via, via old school message boards.
But he had a lot of fans who would say, record a 30 second recording of a dream, and I will pair you with a buddy of mine, whatever, who's an animator, and they would animate that dream. And that's awesome. It's, it's amazing. He made a thing called Earth Sandwich, which is the simplest thing in the world, but he did some coding to allow you to enter your address into a field and spit out the exact geographic coordinates on the, on the exact opposite side of the planet.
With the idea being that you take a slice of bread, put it down where you are, somebody on the opposite side of the earth take a slice of bread, you both take pictures, and then talk to each other. Some opposite sides of the world. Uh, the Stamps Project was the one where he taught people how to make like little rubber stamps, had a physical book shipped to one fan, added their stamp, they got the address of the next fan, shipped it.
All around the world, thousands and thousands of people involved. All this kind of stuff is cool ways of fostering community. That was the Animate Your Dreams thing, but I will skip it.
Jazza
Jazza is a current arts YouTuber. He does all kinds of cool creative stuff, but one of the things that he does most frequently are community submissions.
In some cases, somebody will send him a requested commission and he’ll draw or paint their idea. Or he might get sent a piece of children's artwork, and he'll recreate their drawings with a more professional flair, or he might sculpt their monsters out of clay.
The Kiffness
The Kiffniss is a South African singer and songwriter who will take pre existing animal videos (eg. cats mewing in a weird way, etc.), and turn them into actual songs. But he also regularly appears in the comments on his videos.
I love this exchange:
It's light, it's fun, and it's a good joke — and it took him probably four seconds to post.