---
title: 'You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than YouTube comments. But Comment Haiku changes that.'
date: '2012-10-30T16:35:30-07:00'
type: post
word_count: 294
char_count: 1665
tokens: 383
categories:
  - Oregon
  - Portland
  - Videos
tags:
  - 'comment haiku'
  - comments
  - 'honey badger'
  - 'keyboard cat'
  - 'nyan cat'
  - 'star wars'
  - wieden+kennedy
  - youtube
---

# You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than YouTube comments. But Comment Haiku changes that.

If you’ve ever spent any time on YouTube, you’ve likely had the displeasure partaking in YouTube comments, a veritable haven for trolls and massacring the English language. But what if you took that fire hose of venom and found a way to make it into art? [Comment Haiku](http://commenthaiku.com/ "Comment Haiku") does exactly that.

The project endeavors to “find poetry in the gutter” by taking comment strings and forcing them into haiku. Best of all? It’s open source so you can play too.

> Comment Haiku is a tech experiment by a small team at W+K Portland. Our aim was to see if it’s possible to use code to convert YouTube comments (generally regarded as total illiterate drivel) into poetry. We feel like we got part of the way there. If you want to see under the hood and look at the code, it’s in two projects on github: haiku and django-haiku. All of the code is under the BSD license and we’d love more people to play.

You can see it in action on [Nyan Cat](http://commenthaiku.com/v/QH2-TGUlwu4/ "Nyan Cat"), [Honey Badger](http://commenthaiku.com/v/4r7wHMg5Yjg/ "Honey Badger"), [Keyboard Cat](http://commenthaiku.com/v/Ig-9SqiB2b8/ "Keyboard Cat"), and [Star Wars Kid](http://commenthaiku.com/v/kR3PT5E0XDo/ "Star Wars Kid"), as well as any [number of other popular videos](http://commenthaiku.com/faves/ "Favorites of the Comment Haiku crew").

For more information, visit [Comment Haiku](http://commenthaiku.com/ "Comment Haiku") or [download the code from Github](https://github.com/wieden-kennedy/haikus/ "Haikus on Github").