I’ve spent some time around the internet. Please don’t read that as a brag; it’s the farthest possible thing from that as it can be. But I grew up with it, and spent a larger chunk of my formative years dawdling around on it. I now have a job that makes money thanks to the internet. It’s a weird world we live in now.
Kevin Durant wrote a YouTube comment that might be the most relatable YouTube comment ever
2017 stays weird, and now we have KD diving into YouTube comments ... and it’s actually worth reading.
One thing you learn about when you spend some serious time on the internet is the comment sections. There are good ones — SB Nation team sites, for example, and I don’t say that just because I’m a company man. And then there are the bad ones: Yahoo comments, and especially YouTube.
Good Lord, YouTube comments are the worst. Racist and sexist at their worst, oft repeating worn out memes, and generally just plain dumb. There’s rarely an intelligent paragraph to be found, much less a conversation thread. We all find ourselves drawn to reading them anyway, but if there are any comment sections to avoid, it’s the YouTube ones.
That’s why I feel comfortable and confident declaring this comment from Kevin Durant — yes, the real Kevin Durant, commenting on YouTube — the most sincere comment in the video sharing site’s history.
COMMENT: Who cares what people think 💭. Just do you. Someone of stature, shouldn’t worry about stuff like that.
DURANT’S REPLY: of my stature, I play basketball, I got acne, I grew up with nothing, in still figuring myself out in my late 20, I slide in DMs, I make fun of my friends, I drink beers and play Xbox. I’m closer to you than u think
We’ve had our fill of Durant news this week, and to be fair, he has been sincere following his social media debacle. But this comment — notably made five days ago, although it didn’t catch hold on social media until Wednesday, after everything broke loose — is relatable and surprisingly so for a super mega basketball star who seems so unequivocally different from you or me. Hell, just that Durant reads YouTube comments is relatable.
I don’t know if there’s a grand takeaway here. I feel bad for Durant to an extent, but he still royally screwed up this whole fake Twitter thing. (He said as much.) I don’t feel much sympathy knowing that he was using an anonymous Instagram to blast kids. But I’m glad I’m not famous, because I’d probably have the urge to do the same thing.
(By the way, Instagram comment sections definitely fall in the bottom third in my nonexistent rankings.)
I guess if there’s one thing worth mentioning, it’s that there isn’t some careful selection for famous people — it’s just ordinary people who end up on a pedestal. That’s not a defense of Durant, but an acknowledgement that he’s as flawed as any of the rest of us.
