The YouTube Comment Insult Generator Is Hilarious, Not Really Video-Related

There's a new way to waste time on the Internet, as there is every day. But this time it's sort of, semi, kind of related to video. It's the YouTube Comment Insult Generator. It culls the very dark depths of the YouTube commenting system, and returns keyword-based insults from actual YouTube comments (of the negative variety).

As you can probably already tell, this post isn't really news... and it's not applicable to video marketing. Instead, it's just a little bit of barely-video-related fun with YouTube comments.

The YouTube Comment Insult Generator

The YouTube Comment Insult Generator site itself couldn't be more minimalist if it tried. Here's a screenshot:

Yup. That's the entire website right there. Two lines of text and a search field. That's it. No confusion whatsoever about what you're supposed to do.

The site was created by Adrian Holovaty as a side project, which he says is more of an exercise in finding structured data in unlikely places than an actual tool he intends people to use to find insults.

Holovaty got the inspiration from the now-typical YouTube commenters that insult those other users who have "disliked" a particular video. Usually, the insulter takes the number of the video's dislikes and then insults those people in a way that references the video content. He uses an example of an iPhone video with 439 dislikes, where a commenter wrote: "439 people own a zune."

Holovaty says the tool will find real world YouTube comments, negative ones, that are keyword-based. He describes it like this:

This is a basically a "search engine for insults." Type in a search term, and it'll give you insults you can use against a person who doesn't like that term.

For example, enter "the godfather," and it'll give you "You sleep with the fishes," "You sleeps with horsehead in bed" and "You will get an offer you can't refuse." Enter "alfred hitchcock" and it'll say "You had your eyes plucked out by crows" and "You have Vertigo." Enter "mario brothers" and it'll say "You aren't Super enough for Mario," "You can't beat world 1-1" and "You are bowser." You get the idea.

Here's how it works:

How does this work? It uses the YouTube API to search for the top 50 most relevant videos for your search term. For each of those videos, it grabs the latest 50 comments. Then it looks through all that for comments starting with a number followed by a word such as "people," "youtubers" or "nincompoops." Finally, it just replaces the number and the word "people" with "You."

Now, this isn't technically video-related. But it is fun. So I'm giving it to you while it's technically still the weekend. But I do think it's an interesting experiment in tapping into YouTube data through the API, which I'm sure some of our developer readers will enjoy.

Anyway... I decided to have a laugh and see what kind of insults I could get for "video marketing," so I could insult you all, but the generator couldn't find any results for that phrase. So I tried "SEO," and got this:

You don't follow web standards :P

That'll have to do. Happy insulting, everyone.

Click here to try the YouTube Comment Insult Generator yourself!