In this topic I want to address a phenomena that I think is in-part killing the message that the science&reason community is trying to send out.
The above is perhaps a bit strong worded but I just wanted to state what this topic was about before writing lots of text.
Something I notice when I do read the comments below videos is the amount of fanboyism. People will fanatically defend their "camp". While fanaticism might be right up any religious person's ally I would hope that commenter's who are for the "reason" side of things would be a bit more critical.
Take for instance the claim from VenomFangX that he got threats. Now despite the fact that he has not shown proof for this, I could very well believe him when reading the comments bellow videos.
So with above in mind, I think there is a general "problem". There is a problem in communication. The video's of reason proponents for the most part communicate on a very civil maner, but his "followers" do not, and communicate in a very aggressive manner.
Now if for a moment I may assume that the goal of the people who make videos to propagate science and reason is to propagate science and reason. It would be beneficial to try and motivate these followers to be more civil.
So the discussion I think is interesting would be if it is worth it to try and "educate" (for lack of better word) the youtube commenter's, and if so how to go about doing that.
Now personally I have to answer yes to the first, the second part is perhaps a bit more tricky.
But a possibility I could see is having a mutual video that depicts a few community guidelines the author supports. A code of conduct if you will.
In the open source community this has been done for a while and has certainly made a effect. Of course while that does show that such a thing can work, a open source community is very much not the same as the community on youtube.
The above is perhaps a bit strong worded but I just wanted to state what this topic was about before writing lots of text.
Something I notice when I do read the comments below videos is the amount of fanboyism. People will fanatically defend their "camp". While fanaticism might be right up any religious person's ally I would hope that commenter's who are for the "reason" side of things would be a bit more critical.
Take for instance the claim from VenomFangX that he got threats. Now despite the fact that he has not shown proof for this, I could very well believe him when reading the comments bellow videos.
So with above in mind, I think there is a general "problem". There is a problem in communication. The video's of reason proponents for the most part communicate on a very civil maner, but his "followers" do not, and communicate in a very aggressive manner.
Now if for a moment I may assume that the goal of the people who make videos to propagate science and reason is to propagate science and reason. It would be beneficial to try and motivate these followers to be more civil.
So the discussion I think is interesting would be if it is worth it to try and "educate" (for lack of better word) the youtube commenter's, and if so how to go about doing that.
Now personally I have to answer yes to the first, the second part is perhaps a bit more tricky.
But a possibility I could see is having a mutual video that depicts a few community guidelines the author supports. A code of conduct if you will.
In the open source community this has been done for a while and has certainly made a effect. Of course while that does show that such a thing can work, a open source community is very much not the same as the community on youtube.
