The worst part is, those people actually think themselves clever!
I used to get more outraged about this, until I thought about who it is that actually posts on youtube about computer games. Most of us adults with jobs don't comment on youtube videos - we'll watch them, and send them on to friends, but it's a matter of sending stuff back and forth when you're slacking off in the office. You're not actually invested enough to log in and write comments in the thread beneath it - or even to read comments (if you're going to make a comment on it, the comment will be to the person who sent you the link, not on the youtube forum itself).
Now I'm only hypothesising here, but I suspect most teenagers don't get involved in these threads either. They're already involved up to the necks in their own social network, comprised mostly of people they know from real life. They'll be making comments to their friends on Facebook, not to the internet-at-random on Youtube or other public fora.
So this sort of youtube comment thread is made up of 2 groups of people. Overwhelmingly, most of the posters are kids, and when you take that into account it isn't that bad - you EXPECT kids to have shit taste for the most part, to follow the next big trend (in this regard, the tendency of some games to inexplicably 'hit the trend' among young kids and sell bucketloads is no different to how toys have been sold since well before I was a kid - I'm sure there were older folks shaking their heads at me and my peers' insistence on having to pester our parents into buying us every single Transformer, including all the ones that were just recoloured clones of each other). You also don't expect young kids to appreciate decent writing, or to understand why we enjoy FO1 more than FO3 - not because they're incapable of it (young kids will obsessively study and learn arcane game mechanics more than most adults, once they've been hooked on the game, or if it's the trend of the moment) but because it's unfair to even expect them to grasp the enjoyment of a game based on mechanics that they've never been introduced to.
That group doesn't bother me: I've got no business listening in to the conversations of primary school children, and I shouldn't complain if doing so leads my brain to melt at the inanity of kids being kids.
Then there's the other group - those people so pathetic, unemployed, deranged (sexually, socially or politically) or creepily obsessive that they hop onto forums to post to 'the internet in general' about computer games. Grown adults acting like 10 year olds, and who get violently angry when arguing with posters who actually ARE 10 year old kids.
We at the Codex fall across the 3 categories of 'deranged', of course
Even accepting that we're a part of this group, it's hardly going to be representative of the general market. It isn't going to be any more or less 'hardcore' per se, but it IS going to be completely retarded when it comes to interpersonal communication. And regardless of whether they have good or bad taste in games, their reasons for holding those tastes are far more likely to correspond to some poorly thought through but aggressively defended pre-conception of what all games must be like.
Youtube probably has an even higher proportion of kids than usual, while gaming sites and fora are more likely to house concentrations of deranged adults. But neither group is of particular cause for concern.
It's like discovering that the man caught masturbating with a cheese grater while peeping through windows at the residents of elderly care homes getting changed is ALSO a member of the rpgcodex. Before discovering that he's a codexer, such a person is understandably rather disturbing. But once I learn he's a Codexer, the appropriate response is one of relief - because it means that the number of masochistic publically masturbating creeps with a fetish for nude 80 year olds is no higher than what I already knew it to be beforehand. Similarly, there's no reason to be concerned by the discovery that kids and lunatics are acting like kids and lunatics when they post online.