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It blows my mind that Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” video on YouTube has over 45,000 comments.
I’ve said this before, but I just don’t understand what motivates commenter No. 45,093.
There’s no video — only audio — but if you like “White and Nerdy,” you will love “Baby Got Stats” — courtesy of the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics. They also do poetry.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
@ Clint No. 6
I agree!
As a student of said JHU department, I love this entry. Don’t know if it’s been posted online yet, but there’s also a pretty masterful ‘Dick in a Box’ spoof video.
Re: “just don’t understand what motivates” — I’m a little annoyed that you’re making fun of the 45,000th commenter. It makes it seem you don’t really want to know the answer. I don’t think this question is that hard to answer, at least in general terms, as the above commenters already have; if you want more definites, you’ll have to design a way to work it out. Set the behavioral economists on it.
I’m waiting to be commenter number eleven…. D’OH!
I post on this blog occasionally, as I do on most serious blogs I read. The funniest thing happened last week. My high school daughter was online chatting with my college daughter, and she asked me if I had commented on a Freakonomics post. Surprised, I said sure. Well, it seems that my remote daughter was reading the Freakonomics blog while chatting with my local daughter, and she was saying, “good point … OMG! That’s Dad!”
I bet they would have dramatically fewer if new comments went to the bottom of the list, rather than the prime spot right below the video.
Another possible explanation -
Nowadays lot of spam is posted on comments. Possibly a seo tactic.
With YouTube specifically, comments are Newest first by default, so if you comment, it will be seen, at least briefly. With sites like this, however, I’d say anything past the first 10, 20, 50, maybe 100 is unlikely to be read.
Worth checking out is this link: http://www.thatsaspicymeatball.com/comments/
It shows the latest comments on MetaFilter (a web community posting interesting links) and YouTube. The difference is just shocking. The illiteracy shown on YouTube is just depressing.
And of course, there’s this great comic: http://xkcd.com/202/