Why Do People Tell Sad Stories in YouTube Comments?

Or, the anatomy of a YouTube comment

May 15, 2025

Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, where music and data live together in sweet, beautiful harmony. If you are new here, my name is Chris Dalla Riva. I have been making original music for the last 15 years and work for the streaming service Audiomack on analytics and personalization. Today, I want to talk about a streaming service that I don’t work for: YouTube.

Why Do People Tell Sad Stories in YouTube Comments?

By Chris Dalla Riva

Anytime I scroll through the Facebook group for the town that I grew up in, I’m always shocked about the petty things that people are arguing over. But this dynamic has become par for the course across most of the internet. Head to any social media site and you will see strangers hurling insults they’d never dare speak in person. There’s one website that breaks this rule, though: YouTube.

Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is filled with vile videos and comments. But if you head to nearly any popular song on the platform and scroll through the top comments, you’ll find yourself in a place that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else on the web. Here, for example, is a (lightly edited version of a) comment that I recently came across on No Doubt’s 1996 hit “Don’t Speak”:

I became a young father at 18. Me and my daughter were always together for the first 3.5 years of her life. Things didn't work out between her mother and me. Every time [my daughter and I] would see each other we would play this song.
We lost touch for many years cause I was having a hard time with drugs and alcohol due to depression. Every now and then, she would text or send me this song to let me know she loves and misses me. She's in her late 20s and is a mother herself now. She still sends me this song letting me know how much she remembers the beautiful bond we had when she was little.
This song has super sentimental value to me as a young man and father. It will forever mark my bond with my princess. She made me a grandfather just this year, and she played this for me after giving birth. Thank you to Gwen and the band for giving me such a good memory.

Why did this person feel compelled to share this anecdote with strangers on YouTube? Why is every reply from those strangers filled with kindness? Why isn’t the rest of the internet like this? Head to most popular songs on YouTube and you will be asking yourself the same questions.

At least that’s what I thought. But maybe I was only remembering the videos with the poignant comments. Maybe they were actually quite rare. So, I decided to check. I downloaded the top 1,000 comments for each of the 500 most popular songs on YouTube. After wrestling with ChatGPT for a few hours, I was able to categorize these comments. Here’s what I found:

Only 1.3% of this sample of comments contained a moving personal story, whether happy or sad. That said, those comments accounted for nearly 3% of upvotes.
1.8% of comments were people saying they returned just to check the view count (e.g., “Who is here for only the likes and views?”)
4% of comments were people writing out the lyrics to the song
4.5% were people saying they love or hate the song

Those comments only account for 11.6% of the sample, though. What’s going on with the rest of them? Almost 25% are just people making jokes or referencing memes (e.g., “Teacher: how many people are in the world? Me: about a despacito,” “can confirm: he never gave us up”). The rest are random crap (e.g., “SHARE”) and engagement farming (e.g., “who is here because they saw a dog singing this on facebook :D”).

To reiterate, it’s quite rare for people to share a moving story in the comment section of a song on YouTube. These comments just feel more common because they are more memorable than someone typing something like, “I'm leaving my comment here so that when someone gives me a "like" I'll get a notification and remember that I have to listen to this work of art.”

Still, even if they are a small part of the musical comment corpus, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering why people feel the need to write these moving, semi-anonymous stories on YouTube.

The Psychology of a YouTube Comment

During the 1970s and 1980s, the most important radio personality in the world was Casey Kasem. Kasem hosted American Top 40, a radio program that counted down the 40 most popular songs in the United States each week. The show was very popular. In fact, it lives on in an iteration hosted by Ryan Seacrest.

Part of the appeal of Casey Kasem was that his show seemed to radiate goodness. Along with hours of popular songs, his soft voice peppered the show with throwbacks, assorted trivia, and — what came to be the most well-know segment on the show — long distance dedications.

The premise of the long-distance dedication was simple. Kasem would read a letter on the air from a listener and then play whatever song they requested. Here is a long distance dedication from 1979:

Dear Casey,
About six months ago, I stood with a gun against my head. I was disgusted with life and tired of the beatings I received from my drunk mother. In the seconds before I pulled the trigger, I tried to think of someone who cared. James came to my mind but quickly left because James had moved away, and our only correspondence was an occasional letter. I pulled the trigger, but it didn’t fire.
While I was trying to figure out what went wrong with the gun, my alarm radio came on, and I heard the DJ announce the song “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. Instead, Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” came over the air. It was the very song James had dedicated to me before he left for Oklahoma. The record finished, and the DJ said, “I don’t know what made me play that. I know it wasn’t the song I announced, but I played it anyway.”
I phoned my friend James, and while I was talking to him, my mother overhead me say that I would do anything to help her if only I could get her to help herself. After I hung up, she ran to me sobbing and said she would seek help immediately.
Casey, if you would play “Can’t Smile Without You” for my brave and wonderful mother who’s attending Alcoholics Anonymous, for my best friend James who made me realize killing myself wasn’t the answer, and for Gary Lee Love, the nighttime disc jockey at WQEN Gadsden, Alabama, whose mistake saved my life, I would appreciate it very much. I wouldn’t be smiling today if it weren’t for those three people.
Thanks and love,
Wendy

This dedication reads very similar to the poignant stories you will read on the comments of a YouTube video for a popular song. So, I think understanding why someone would leave one of those comments is similar to understanding why someone would write to Casey Kasem.

First, I think much of the appeal is the partial anonymity. In the same way that someone you know might have heard your dedication on American Top 40, someone you know might see your YouTube comment. That said, the large majority of people will have no idea who you are. That can be freeing. In fact, I think there’s some commonality with why it’s sometimes easier to speak to a random therapist about something rather than someone you know.

Second, I don’t think we can underrate the musical component. Music is intimately connected to people and places in our lives. Because of that, nearly everybody has the experience of a song transporting them across space and time. When you see a soul-baring comment on a music video on YouTube, you know where that person is coming from in a way that you might not if they shared their story in another venue. The music in the background binds us.

As someone who has spent years shouting into the void of the internet by both making music and writing essays, I can attest to the therapeutic nature of telling your story. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your story publicly or you’ve never been able to find the right place to do it, the YouTube comment section might be just what you’re looking for.

If you’ve ever seen a moving YouTube comment, please click the button below to share it with me.

Leave a comment

A New One
"Clueless" by Beach Bunny
2025 - Indie Rock

Though Chicago-based indie rockers Beach Bunny have been slowly building a fanbase since the mid-2010s, things really took off when their songs “Prom Queen” and “Cloud 9” went viral on TikTok. Unlike many artists that go viral on the short-form video platform, Beach Bunny had the chops to build a career from that virality.

Their latest LP Tunnel Vision is tightly written but packed with confessional lyrics that made them popular. The YouTube video for the album’s single “Clueless” is also filled with people going through quarter-life crises:

I'm in a mid-twenties crisis where everyone I come across is younger, smarter, and more accomplished than I am. I feel so lost and behind in life. I want nothing more to get a do-over and go back in time. My age doesn't match my maturity.
This song feels like it came straight out of one of my journal entries. Life moves on so fast and just thinking about the fact that it's been nearly 10 years since I graduated high school sends me into a tizzy.

An Old One
"Too Late to Turn Back Now" by Cornelius Bros. & Sister Rose
1972 - Soul

In writing this piece, I would be remiss not to acknowledge Mark Slutsky’s long-defunct blog Sad YouTube, where he chronicled the long, somber comments that people leave on YouTube videos. While flipping through the blog, I noticed that there were many comments featured from various versions of the Cornelius Brothers’ 1972 hit “Too Late to Turn Back Now.” Something about this song just makes people feel nostalgic. Here’s one of those comments that Slutsky featured:

Said good bye to my girlfriend in high school listening to this song as we made out for the last time in 1972! She left California to live in Missouri with her family who was transferred from the Ford Plant in Pico Rivera! Will always remember you, Jan Garcia…………………..

Shout out to the paid subscribers who allow this newsletter to exist. Along with getting access to our entire archive, subscribers unlock biweekly interviews with people driving the music industry, monthly round-ups of the most important stories in music, and priority when submitting questions for our mailbag. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!

Recent Paid Subscriber Interviews: Pitchfork’s Editor-in-Chief • Katy Perry Collaborator • Spotify’s Former Data Guru • Music Supervisor • John Legend Collaborator • Rock Critic • What It’s Like to Go Viral • Adele Collaborator

Recent Newsletters: Pop Music Kill Rate • The Lostwave Story • Blockbuster Nostalgia • Weird Band Names • Two-Hit Wonders • A Frank Sinatra Mystery

Want to hear the music that I make? Check out my latest single “Give It To Me” wherever you stream music.