YouTube comments: emotional expression and collective nostalgia

"When I was a kid, I understood 'I haven't eaten, I haven't eaten, baby'", wrote @rachacond six years ago in the video of Come with Me on Christina Aguilera's official YouTube channel. The singer warns that her heart is ready, the party has started, we will dance without control, then @agustinburgos427 asks the "new generations" to "not let this song die." Some people join the call, self-identifying as part of the new generations (claiming to be 17 years old) and keeping the pop singer's musical legacy alive. Some skeptics comment that the new generations have their eyes on other things. Christina continues to ask them to come with her, and in a brief scroll, two comments appear that will be repeated as often as the song's chorus: a childhood memory: "my grandfather used to clap proudly when I sang Ven conmigo." And the star comment, the most famous meme on this platform: "Is anyone listening to this in 2026? Just you?"

The YouTube algorithm automatically plays another track: La quiero a morir by DLG. And again, many commenters agree that all past times were better. @marygutierrez5076 wrote four years ago: "When this song came out, we were all at our best moments... Confirm." And 3,300 likes agree.

This phenomenon knows no gender; the same devotion that international pop awakens can be found in the corners of Argentine rock, where users cast bottles into the sea in the form of comments. On the right side of the screen, La hija del fletero from the official channel of (the Argentine rock band) Patricio Rey and his Redonditos de Ricota appears as a suggestion.

The first comment that appears was left by @sucundrule3172 a year ago: "I know it's very likely that it will never happen, but one day nostalgia will hit you, and you'll seek out this track. If you find my comment, know that your love still gives me chills and that I truly hope you are doing well."

Scrolling down a bit more, @lunaticodiamante challenged three years ago: "This CD is 29 years old! Let's see if all the music that plays now in Argentina will still be playing in 29 years."

A community organized through nostalgia

YouTube videos, especially music ones, have no moderator to act as a conversation police. They also do not explicitly seek or initiate conversation. Users, almost anonymous, come in, comment, and move on to the next video. A decentralized community that, nevertheless, shares an order: nostalgia.

Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia says: "Nostalgia is a feeling of loss and uprooting, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy." In another section of the book, she defines it as "a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. Nostalgic desire seeks to erase history and transform it into a private or collective mythology, to traverse time as if it were a space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that afflicts the human condition." In layman's terms, the operation we somehow perform with the past is to romanticize it, to cleanse that time of fissures, contradictions, and pains. We fantasize about how simple that moment was.

In 2001, Shakira released Servicio de lavandería, an album that, among many other hits, includes a song titled Lucky, which she dedicated to Antonio De la Rúa, her partner at the time. A timing as bad as it was spectacular, given that it coincided with an unprecedented institutional crisis in Argentina, caused by her father-in-law. And this issue is not lost on Argentine commenters, like @tebano5577, who recalls: "This video will never go out of style in ARGENTINA because it is part of our recent history: Shakira was then in a romance with the son of the President of Argentina and wrote this song for him (who was known here as 'Antonito' De la Rúa). That's why the lyrics say = 'Lucky that you were born in the South / and that we can overcome distances Lucky to have met you / and to love strange lands because of you.'"

Without a doubt, 2001 was kinder to Shakira.

But @imnotsebastian9456 left a very significant comment to think about this phenomenon: "Shakira has the power to make me listen to music that's over 5 years old and not get tired of hearing it even if I do it more than 10 times in a day."

How distant is the past we long for?

"Wheat field, where my hands expand, compress, and seize..." the Argentine singer Sandro sang in 1969.

There is a fairly direct association between nostalgia and aging, as an emotion typical of the elderly. However, specifically applied to this platform, a study titled "How long ago were the 'good old days'?" published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2023 investigated the relationship between age and what users would rate as "good times." They analyzed 56 YouTube videos titled "Best Songs of (year)," from the 1950s to 2020. They collected over 37,000 comments posted on those videos and applied an automated textual analysis tool to detect expressions of positive valuation of certain historical periods, manifestations of longing for the past, and explicit mentions of nostalgia.

The study found that there is a prevalence of nostalgia for the recent past (mainly the 2000s, and then the 2010s) over the more distant decades (the 1950s and 1960s). What this finding discusses is that nostalgia is not simply a phenomenon of old age, opening a new dimension for this emotion: it is not only experienced by the young, but there are records of it being felt by people who did not live through those times. For example, @antonellarezlanmonaco8684 experienced this two years ago with Trigal by Sandro: "He was the Elvis Presley of Latin America, such a sensual, talented, and beautiful guy ❤️ at my 27 years old wishing I had lived in that time when music was good."

On this, Boym reflects in her book when she says that there is an underlying affective longing for a community that had collective memory, a desire for continuity in an increasingly fragmented world. Something like a defense mechanism in times of accelerated life rhythms and historical upheavals. Again, a romance with one's own fantasy.

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And speaking of romance, @jhonnycort commented five years ago that the 562 dislikes on the blood video belong either to "reggaeton artists" or to those who "don't understand the art of poetry." Because "this romantic music from the 70s, 80s, and 90s is unique and hard to match."

Some songs from the eighties that my dad still listens to

Since 2021, there has been a YouTube compilation titled "some 80s music my dad still listens to til this day." The video is under 25 minutes long and starts with Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears, which interestingly suggests from the very first verse that there's no turning back. The first comment was left by @dragon-ry9cn two years ago, saying: "I'm a 19-year-old girl from Italy and honestly, I think the music from the 70s, 80s, and 90s has something more than what we have today." The second comment aligns with the first: "I was born in the 70s and grew up with the pop culture of the 80s and 90s. Things died in the early 2000s," said @Icarebear, sparking a debate with another user who claims everything died in 2010 while another argues it was 2016.

Around 2013, Mark Fisher published The Ghosts of My Life. Among other things, this text posits the thesis that contemporary culture has lost the ability to generate new and genuinely modern forms. Music, film, and art are limited to recycling past aesthetics instead of creating something new. To illustrate this, he presents the following example: "Imagine what would happen if we took any album released in recent years, transported it back in time to, say, 1995, and played it on the radio. It's hard to think it would cause any kind of shock to listeners. On the contrary, what would likely surprise our 1995 audience is how recognizable the sounds would be to them: is music really going to change so little in seventeen years? (...) In the last ten or fifteen years, the Internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience to the point of making it unrecognizable. However, or perhaps because of all this, there is a growing sense that culture has lost its ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in a very important sense, there is no longer a present that can be grasped or articulated." In 2020, Dua Lipa released Future Nostalgia, an album that received (and continues to receive) great acclaim from the community and won a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album. Moreover, it is the perfect example for Fisher's analysis: it's a revitalized pop proposal explicitly built from the sound grammars of the 80s and 90s (disco basslines, bright synthesizers, funk grooves, but with contemporary digital polish). And if we're talking about feeling nostalgia for the future, @jeanettesaunders5447 can't help but wonder, in the song that shares the album's title, if we've realized that this song will also become nostalgia for us. To expand on Fisher, I highly recommend Digital Ruins: The Ghostly Corners of the Internet, by Paula Yeyati Preiss.

"I was born in 2005, but I love 80s music. My mom always asked me questions about it. It's 2023, it's Monday, it's getting late, and this masterpiece relaxes me. 80s music is very soothing to listen to. It really makes you think about the world," commented @mops1817 on the YouTube compilation of 80s music. Fisher also revisits the concept of hauntology (haunt, as in ghost) to explain how forms from the past enchant the present: "Hauntology can then be constructed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to let go of the ghost or (which is sometimes the same) the denial of the ghost to abandon us. The specter will not allow us to settle for the mediocre satisfactions we can harvest in a world governed by capitalist realism."

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So, is there no turning back? Or is there just a way back?

@Hdkeof wondered a year ago if anyone can imagine that in 1000 years there will be people listening to this.

You're going through the same thing I am

You expect to find me somewhere, you roam every place where we used to be, sings Marcela Morelo since 2005. "My girlfriend told me she liked Marcela Morelo because she listened to her when she was 13 or 14, she actually just liked this song, but when I'm with her, I try to play all the well-known songs by Marcela to pass the time and avoid putting on reggaeton," commented @unmelodrama.

In 2020 (if there's one global consensus, it's that no one wants to go back to that year), the magazine Music and Science published a study asking if there was such a thing as a peak of musical reminiscence. To do this, they surveyed 470 people aged 18 to 82 and showed them 111 popular songs that were in the charts between 1950 and 2015.

For each song, they asked participants to respond whether they knew it, if it evoked a personal memory from their life, and if they liked the song. What they found is that there is indeed a musical peak around the age of 14; the songs that were playing when the majority of respondents were that age generated more autobiographical memories and a greater sense of familiarity than the music from other periods of their lives.

"Anyone who was a child or pre-teen in 2005 and now comes looking for a bit of nostalgia, please let me know so I don't feel like the only fool..." requested @facundoriveros5735.

In a world that moves too fast, YouTube comments are a private mythology where time doesn't pass, and where, perhaps, someone reads us simultaneously and confirms that this is happening to them too.

If reading comments on YouTube is also your passion, here's an Instagram account that collected some and immortalized them until the Internet separates us.