YouTube Comments: “I Need a Doctor,” by Dr. Dre feat. Eminem and Skylar Grey

One of my favorite things about the YouTube comment ranking system is the ingenuity with which YouTubers attempt to earn one of the coveted spots in the Highest Rated Comments box at the top of the page. To have one’s comment featured there–especially in a massively popular video–is akin to having one’s brains preserved in a jar for scientific research, to having one’s visage sculpted into the side of a mountain. It is the highest honor a YouTube commenter can achieve.

Now, there are several ways one can launch himself into this Internet trophy case. An especially witty bon mot usually does the trick; vociferously aligning oneself with the maker of the video also works well. But perhaps no strategy is as foolproof as mocking the users who voted “Thumbs Down” on a video by commenting with a clever play on the number of users who down-voted followed by a disparaging line from the video/the title of the video.

Here is a look at this strategy at work on YouTube’s most-watched video of the week, which was, with over 8 million views in seven days, the music video for Dr. Dre and Eminem’s song titled (AND THIS IS IMPORTANT) “I Need a Doctor.”

As of press time, the video has 108,556 “Likes” and 3,163 “Dislikes,” and 75,310 comments. For the sake of my sanity, my social life, and my poor, poor optical mouse, I did not comb through all 75,310 comments. I began my investigation when there were 1,986 dislikes, 1986 also being the year that Dr. Dre met Easy-E, to whom the video is dedicated. This seemed to be at least a semi-justifiable (and optical-mouse-preserving) starting point.

What follows is, from the point in time marked by that 1,986th dislike, a comprehensive look at commenters taking their best shots at YouTube glory, their most foolproof attempts at having their avatars chiseled into the side of Mount Youtube.

Did I mention that the title of the song is “I Need a Doctor”?

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