I have always believed in human decency. I have always believed that if a normal person is faced with the decision to be kind or cruel they would choose the better option. When people spoke about human nature as anything other than inherently altruistic, I thought that they were just hiding behind cynicism to ensure they wouldn’t get hurt.

I have always believed in human decency, but then I started a YouTube channel.

The channel wasn’t meant to kickstart an extravagant media career, hell, it wasn’t even meant to be a fun hobby. I just needed a place to easily share videos with extended family. The idea of a stranger stumbling into snapshots of my life never really occurred to me.

But they did. They descended into my life like starving vultures and made me doubt any shred of belief I ever had in human decency.

I posted up the first video about two years ago. It was a quick thirty-second clip from my mother-in-law’s birthday party. A couple months prior her husband of fifty years had passed and my wife wanted to make sure that her mother wouldn’t end up spending her birthday alone. The video was simple but sweet; half a dozen people gathered around an old lady singing happy birthday as she struggled to blow out the candles.

There were three comments.

The first, came from my wife’s sister who was out in Europe on a business trip:

BClarke “Sorry I couldn’t make it! Hope you’re saving some cake for me! Happy birthday mom!”

The second, from my brother, who my wife wasn’t keen on inviting to family gatherings:

RayDavid “Doesn’t look a day over 70! Stay classy Mrs. Clarke!”

And the third, from an account that could only be identified by its blank silhouette profile picture and nondescript name:

AngryGorilla78 “You people are sick. Look at that woman. She doesn’t want to be there. She doesn’t want to be alive anymore. I bet you she cries every night, torn between the pain of her frail body and the agony of living without the love of her life. Just let her die already.”

For a second I wondered whether the comment wasn’t just another one of my brother’s strange jokes, but it was far too vile for even him to type out. I briefly considered responding but I didn’t let my anger get the better of me. I simply deleted the comment and moved on with my life.

I did my best to push the internet stranger’s words out of my head and, for the most part, I did. Whenever we went to visit the old lonely woman in her nursing home, however, AngryGorilla’s assessment of my mother-in-law’s will to live kept echoing through my skull. When we finally laid her to rest last winter the words echoed once more, but there was a finality to them. She was gone. Anything that this YouTube commenter had to say about her was drowned out by a barrage of heartfelt eulogies. I thought that I wouldn’t have to worry about the words of another internet stranger ever again.

I have a daughter. She’s in elementary school. She plays the piano. I have, on multiple occasions, suggested to my wife that our daughter does not like playing the piano but she would hear none of it. My wife’s parents never encouraged her to learn an instrument and she regretted it all her life. She wasn’t going to let our daughter miss out on music as well. So, every Thursday afternoon, for a year and a half, my daughter would get marched into after school piano practice.

A couple months ago she had a recital. Her final one. On the car ride back home our daughter made it very clear that she hated playing the piano. My wife tried convincing her otherwise but I put my foot down and said that if the kid didn’t want to learn an instrument she wouldn’t need to learn an instrument. My daughter, the tiny diplomat, suggested that she could learn an instrument that wasn’t stupid, like, say, a saxophone.

At the recital our daughter performed a rendition of Claire De Lune which my wife caught on camera. The moment we got home my wife insisted I post the recording on YouTube so the rest of the family could see the performance. I got our daughter’s permission to post the video and promised to keep it unlisted so only our friends could see it.

By the time we sat down for dinner the video had already amassed a pile of comments from the family Facebook chat. Possibly in the hopes of changing our daughter’s mind in regards to quitting piano lessons, my wife read each and every single comment out loud over dinner, including the one from my brother’s fiancé that suggested our daughter play the song at their wedding.

When my wife reached the username BashfulVulture44, however, she went quiet. She read the comment to herself under her breath and, when she finished, immediately pulled me out of the dining room.

Whoever BashfulVulture44 was, they were sick.

She wanted me to delete the comment immediately.

Upon reading the bile myself I raced to the computer and deleted the message. I was beyond furious and trying to figure out who from the family chat would have gone through such pains to tear my daughter down, but I quickly realized BashfulVulture44 wasn’t alone.

The comment section was full of his ilk. Dozens of internet strangers were flooding the comment section with cruel comments about my daughter, my wife, me and everyone else in the auditorium. I rushed through the comment section deleting every unfamiliar account I could see, yet whenever I refreshed the page there was another barrage of vitriol to sort through. I was so focused on deleting the individual comments that I didn’t notice the replies.

Beneath each kind comment from the family there were replies. The internet strangers replied to my cousins and parents and in-laws with surgical cruelty. The reply chains were littered with horrible accusations and maddening vulgarity that would make one’s heart hurt, but the worst fury was reserved for the top comment.

JaneBest87 “What a beautiful piece! Really hope you can play it at mine and Ray’s wedding!”

The first reply had over 200 likes.

VoluminousSerpent88 “Is Ray’s secretary coming to the wedding Jane? Probably not. Probably not, but everyone knows. The whole office knows and so does the family. They avoid looking in your eyes for a reason Jane. They know about the secretary and they know Ray’s wives never outlast the honeymoon. How does it feel being a band-aid on a broken man’s scuffed cock?”

Right beneath that reply was my brother, denying the affair and threatening to physically fight whoever wrote the comment. Beneath his reply there was a menagerie of rabid animals making further assertions about Ray’s character and behavior. They spoke at length about his presumed affair. They listed dates and times and locations. The comments were detailed enough to suggest there was an air of truth about them.

I stopped deleting individual comments.

I deleted the video and then the entire channel.

I wiped any trace of my name off YouTube but the damage was done. I don’t know which members of the family had read the comments, but Ray’s fiancé did.

That made all the difference.

Over the next couple of weeks Ray’s wedding plans fell apart. The drama unraveled itself through long phone calls and late night visits all set to the squealing of an inexperienced saxophone player. When the dust finally settled, we were all worse for it. The sea of faceless strangers had unearthed family secrets that made any possibility of a reunion a hellish affair.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the channel. I tried comprehending what had actually happened. How that single link in a family chat had brought so many strangers into our midst and how those strangers knew so much about us. I spent many a night trying to make sense of it all, but I resigned from the hopeless task.

I moved on with my life, intent on forgetting about the masses of the internet and rebuilding the few bridges that still stood. As my brother’s planned wedding date got closer his condition went from bad to worse. Ray had some problems with the drink when we were growing up, but in his adult life he had developed the ability to keep a lid on it. Jane breaking off the engagement robbed him of that ability.

I knew I couldn’t get Ray to stop drinking, he was far too hard-headed for that. So, to make sure he wouldn’t get into a car wreck and to have some semblance of control about how much he drank — I would invite him over to our house. While my wife and daughter would sleep upstairs Ray and I would kick back on the porch with a bottle of whiskey and try to make sense of the world.

It was the night after his wedding was meant to take place, the night when he got drunker and angrier than he ever did before, that I got the e-mail. I was pretty sauced myself and was chugging a glass of water in the kitchen to lessen the looming hangover when my phone dinged.

An e-mail from YouTube.

They were congratulating me on my first 100,000 subscribers.

The shift from confusion to bone chilling terror happened the moment I clicked on the link attached to the e-mail. My channel was back and bigger than ever. The views of the two videos I had deleted were well in the hundreds of thousands, but there was a third video which I had not posted.

It was titled ‘Ray and Jane’s wedding.’

The video was just a couple views shy of a million.

By the time I was back on the porch I had ordered my brother an Uber back home. I was far too panicked to explain my sudden need for his departure and my brother was far too drunk to question it. He put on his coat, had half a cigarette and then rode off into the night with a stranger my smartphone found him.

He left me alone.

He left me alone with my phone.

Immediately, I recognized the location of the video. I had seen the pictures of the old manor where Jane had planned the wedding at just about every family gathering leading up to Christmas. The open face sandwiches, the wedding cake, the tacky table cloths and gold-rimmed wine glasses — the whole wedding was exactly as Jane had planned.

Except for the guests.

The family was there. Ray’s blood, Jane’s blood, smatterings of work friends — all the guests were there. They were there but they all looked old and exhausted and miserable. The whole guest-list for the wedding was there and they were all staring straight into the camera.

The video was taking place during the newlywed’s first dance but even they looked into the lens in abject despair. Both Jane and Ray were shadows of their former selves, yet they still held their shivering bodies against each other in a poor pantomime of a romantic dance.

They danced to a broken rendition of Claire De Lune. Behind the piano that was far too big for her, wearing the same dress she wore for her recital back in the happier days, was my daughter. She was weeping. She was playing the instrument she hated so much and weeping and staring into the camera.

The video refused to disappear. No matter how many times I removed it or deleted the whole channel — the video wouldn’t disappear. The video didn’t disappear and the comment section kept overflowing with ugly, vile assertions about me, my family and everyone I had ever cared for.

To think that there were people out there, hundreds of thousands of people, that were willing to commit such atrocious thoughts to public discourse made me lose all faith in human decency. What worries me so much more, however, what makes my fingers quiver even as I write these words, was the top rated comment on the wedding video.

Six thousand likes and climbing.

RabidCrow69: “Great content! Subbed! Can’t wait for the next upload!”