Why do the worst people on the internet fester in YouTube comment sections?

It’s a mystery, but buried among the illiterate mud-slinging and arguments about ‘real’ dubstep it looks like there are some rays of hope for the human species.

Blogger Mark Slutsky has been posting on his Sad YouTube Tumblr since September 2012, and has now amassed a huge archive of amazing-but-sad personal memories that users have been prompted to share under various songs that mean a lot to them. The songs he’s discovered span all eras and genres, from Dean Martin to Eddy Grant Tom Waits to Taylor Swift, and commenters seem to come from around the world.

Among the gems is a comment under Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’, where a Vietnam veteran writes, “No matter where I am now, when I hear this song, I’m sitting against the bulkhead in the center of a UH-1D, listening to the whine of the transmission and the whap, whap of the rotor blades as they carry us away from a place where a very dedicated group of young men tried to kill us.”

As he explained on Buzzfeed this week, Slutsky wanted to preserve these nuggets which, like so much online content, is at risk of disappearing when videos are deleted or pulled for copyright reasons.

“Recently, Google introduced an overhaul of the system, integrating the comments more deeply with its Google+ social network — changes that are already unbalancing the strange, delicate ecosystem that produces a rare diamond among the thousands of useless or repetitive comments,” he said. “That’s why I started my blog, Sad YouTube — to collect and preserve those precious fossils of human existence.”

Browse Sad YouTube and read more about the blog in Slutsky’s long piece for Buzzfeed.