Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

polygon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 317 posts

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#71

Post by raesene6 »

Frondo wrote: post #56
raesene6 wrote: post #39

I've been watching Youtube vids for a long time (well relatively, like 10+ years) and it's one of my primary forms of entertainment. It has been very interesting to see youtubers come and go, a lot of them seem to burn out on the schedule of trying to produce content regularly, which I can understand, anyone who's edited videos would realise the time it can take to produce something of good quality. Pewdiepie is an i…

You could examine everything I have ever, ever written and you will never find me paying someone to hold up a sign reading "Death to Jews".

No, but I could point to many other mainstream accepted comedians who get TV shows and are part of the "establishment" who have made jokes which mention the holocaust, and a range of other taboo topics. Heck if you want one example just look up Jimmy Carr. He has even made a joke out of the offensiveness of the jokes he tells.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#72

Post by nailer »

jrkatz wrote: post #49
nailer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For PewDiePie recently, the same story: He is an adult (who should know better) performing antisemitic jokes for children, What? Pewdiepie was seeing what people would do at fiverr for five dollars. Most of the jokes were him being rejected. The joke is very clearly not at the expense of Jewish people any more than, say, Nazis doing stupid things in Indiana Jones movies is.

If 'Death to all jews' -- let's not talk around it, that's what was written on the sign -- wasn't the crux of the joke, why didn't he go with something equally likely to be rejected by people who understand English, but less 'Death to all jews'? Frankly, I think it's because he's a moron who doesn't understand that actions and words, however digital and remote, have consequences. Now middle school kids can chortle to…

> why didn't he go with something equally likely to be rejected by people who understand English, but less 'Death to all jews'?

He did. See the other people on fiverr he got to do other, stupid things. You did actually watch the video, right?

> likely to be rejected by people who understand English

They understand English perfectly - their email replies discussing the task were about the same level of English as spoken on HN.

> Now middle school kids can chortle together on the playground, "haha, 'death to all jews', that sure was funny".

If a kid thinks that they've misunderstood the joke (and I'd support rating the video something like '15+ mature' or whatever youtube's equivalent is).

I don't like the video, mainly because it seems like Pewdiepie is exploiting poor people, but saying it's making antisemitic jokes is simply Vox being Vox.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#73

Post by nommm-nommm »

vlunkr wrote: post #63
nommm-nommm wrote: post #48

Eh....this may be an unpopular opinion but this article is supposed to make me feel really bad for the self imposed "workload" of Pewdiepie. Boo hoo, he's so disadvantaged... he made, from my quick research, something like $15 million last year alone . If $15 MILLION salary isn't enough for you that you have to keep "pushing the envelope" being "edgier" for more and more attention then I think you're probably being g…

I don't think it's supposed to make you feel bad for him. Just trying to help outsiders understand what may have happened. Also, people tend to write off the work that youtubers do (they just play video games for a living!!), but nobody bats an eye that pro athletes can make 6-7 figures playing games. I don't think being a youtuber is much different than running a TV show, except that generally they do all or at leas…

>I don't think it's supposed to make you feel bad for him.

Then it was extremely poor writing because I got the impression that was one of the main messages. Maybe there was an interesting message in there but it didn't come through.

I agree that making a good, well produced, YouTube video takes a lot of work. I've never seen PewDiePie's videos but they don't sound very good or like they are much work to produce.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#74

Post by jrkatz »

nicky0 wrote: post #70
jrkatz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'outrage crowd'. Huh. right now, the big blowup is over some guy ('jontron') spouting racist BS. This is bad enough in front of an adult audience, but in fact he is performing this for children. Shouldn't we be mad? For PewDiePie recently, the same story: He is an adult (who should know better) performing antisemitic jokes for children, who might not follow the joke were it funny. When they don't follow it, when it's…

There is always something or someone to be outraged at, and some people get off on it. That's the meaning of "outrage crowd". Moving from one target to another getting indignant. It's self serving, making them feel righteous.

If you're really rockin on your cynicism right now, how is that any better?

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#75

Post by paulpauper »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #48

Eh....this may be an unpopular opinion but this article is supposed to make me feel really bad for the self imposed "workload" of Pewdiepie. Boo hoo, he's so disadvantaged... he made, from my quick research, something like $15 million last year alone . If $15 MILLION salary isn't enough for you that you have to keep "pushing the envelope" being "edgier" for more and more attention then I think you're probably being g…

does't mean he keeps $15 million every year

The problem is that YouTube goes after much smaller people, as well, quite frequently, often for arbitrary or small reasons, and resolving such content disputes is Kafkaesque, taking weeks. Often someone (usually a competitor) will flag a video and then YouTube will pull it and suspend the account or put a restriction on the length of videos (often a 15 minute length restriction for flagged accounts), citing 'copyright infringement', which is a favorite boilerplate explanation, even though nothing was actually infringed upon and no DCMA report was made. If could be trivial as a ringtone or a 10-second clip of some music on a TV in the background, or a midi file from a video game made 25 years ago.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#76

Post by raesene6 »

basisword wrote: post #59

Does anyone here spend much of their usual 'entertainment' time watching YouTube (specifically content creators not TED talks and such)? I started doing it recently just to see what all the fuss is about as it seems pretty common for younger people (and I'm 26 so it's not like I'm old but I didn't do it). After subscribing to a few channels I started watching stuff regularly. Basically if I want to kill 10 mins I'll…

In the Internet scheme of things, I'm probably considered old (43) but youtube is one of my main sources of entertainment. I've got some channels I follow and watch their "show" regularly and others where I'll follow sidebar links if they seem funny.

There's a tonne of content out there and a lot of it isn't great, but on the other hand there's also some very funny stuff.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#77

Post by aembleton »

basisword wrote: post #59

Does anyone here spend much of their usual 'entertainment' time watching YouTube (specifically content creators not TED talks and such)? I started doing it recently just to see what all the fuss is about as it seems pretty common for younger people (and I'm 26 so it's not like I'm old but I didn't do it). After subscribing to a few channels I started watching stuff regularly. Basically if I want to kill 10 mins I'll…

I'm 34 and I probably spend at lest an hour each evening that I'm at home watching YouTube.

I don't watch any fiction on YouTube except for Adrian Bliss [1] who mocked vloggers and actually has story arcs running through the videos.

I subscribe to many channels but my favourites are Casey Neistat [2], mainly just from the production quality point of view. Tom Scott [3] because he just covers some very interesting topics. And Techmoan [4] because I also have a fascination with old HiFi gear and his puppet sketches at the end of some videos are brilliant.

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChYARX5Yj8CapM-F2Z2vPxA

2. https://www.youtube.com/user/caseyneistat

3. https://www.youtube.com/user/enyay

4. https://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#78

Post by fullshark »

542458 wrote: post #24
minimaxir wrote: post #13

It's worth nothing that this article was posted a month ago: since then, there was another incident along the same lines where popular YouTuber JonTron imploded for the same reasons as described in the article. Jim Sterling has the most objective take on the sequence of events: http://www.thejimquisition.com/youtubers-say-the-darndest-th...

That hadn't occurred to me before, but I think you're right in that JonTron's situation is roughly comparable to the second half of OP's article. Any real publicist would have advised him that doing that debate was a bad idea or at least would have prepped him for it, but it doesn't look like he got any such advice (or if he did he didn't listen to it). There's probably a point to be made that a real publicist would…

That's part of YouTube vloggers' appeal though. They seem genuine and not personalities and anecdotes carefully crafted by publicists like you see from celebrities on talk shows. This leads to the greater risk of someone doing something moronic, but the rewards are a greater connection with fans.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#79

Post by nicky0 »

jrkatz wrote: post #74
nicky0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always something or someone to be outraged at, and some people get off on it. That's the meaning of "outrage crowd". Moving from one target to another getting indignant. It's self serving, making them feel righteous.

If you're really rockin on your cynicism right now, how is that any better?

I'm no better. I'm a terrible and flawed human, and I admit it. I don't pretend to be a concerned citizen righting wrongs and protecting children.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#80

Post by jrkatz »

nailer wrote: post #72
jrkatz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 'Death to all jews' -- let's not talk around it, that's what was written on the sign -- wasn't the crux of the joke, why didn't he go with something equally likely to be rejected by people who understand English, but less 'Death to all jews'? Frankly, I think it's because he's a moron who doesn't understand that actions and words, however digital and remote, have consequences. Now middle school kids can chortle to…

> why didn't he go with something equally likely to be rejected by people who understand English, but less 'Death to all jews'? He did. See the other people on fiverr he got to do other, stupid things. You did actually watch the video, right? > likely to be rejected by people who understand English They understand English perfectly - their email replies discussing the task were about the same level of English as spok…

> He did. See the other people on fiverr he got to do other, stupid things. You did actually watch the video, right?

He did all those other things and he still did 'death to all jews'. I'm saying he didn't need to do that one at all. If he did other things in the video it supports my position.

> If a kid thinks that they've misunderstood the joke

Yes, kids are by and large stupid.

Post reply on HN