Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, is YouTube’s most famous video game-related personality. He has announced that he is permanently disabling comments on his videos due to a near-constant barrage of spam, provocations, and people replying to said nonsense.
He enjoys over 30 million subscribers, a few of whom will no doubt be affected by the change in his policy to cease interaction with commenters.
PewDiePie published a video making the announcement, titled “Goodbye Forever Comments,” wherein he explained his decision to put an end to the noise.
"I go to the comments and it’s mostly spam, and people self-advertising, it’s people who are trying to provoke, and people replying to all these, just all this stuff to me, it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t care about it. I don’t want to see it. I just don’t care."
"It’s been bothering me for so long now, I’ve been trying to find solutions to it, I’ve been hoping it would get better, I was hoping YouTube would try to figure a way out, but it doesn’t seem like it, and I’m just sick of it," he said. "So I’m going to turn the comments off forever, they’re not coming back this time around.”
"I wouldn’t say we lose something, I would say we’re taking the next step in the right direction. This has been going on for too long, the comments being shit," said PewDiePie.
PewDiePie further stated that he would not be ending all interaction with his viewers, stating that he would be able to communicate with them through social websites like Twitter and Reddit, where the signal-to-noise ratio is a lot better than it is on YouTube.
It remains to be seen whether he'll be accused of censoring his viewers, as others, including Feminist Frequency creator Anita Sarkeesian, have been for adopting a similar stance.
