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Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

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Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#61

Post by baby »

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".

You're not a comedian.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#62

Post by empath75 »

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…

He makes enough money to hire writers.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#63

Post by vlunkr »

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 least most of the work on their own, creative, technical, business, etc.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#64

Post by fein »

ForRealsies wrote: post #17
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...

Has JonTron's popularity gone down? I don't follow any of it, I just heard he was dropping red pills. Which is more than I heard of him before.

How far we've come that citing common statistics counts as dropping red pills.

I don't have high hopes for how we look back on this period a few years into the future. Many people with their head stuck in the sand.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#65

Post by jrkatz »

Neliquat wrote: post #47
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…

With all respect, it is the parents responsibility, not youtube or jontron, to make sure their little angel is not drinking in racist rants.

For an extreme example, suppose stormfront camps outside your child's school passing out leaflets and having fun, racist singalongs. How can it be your responsibility when they're in an area that is effectively outside your control? Sure, once you find out about it you can pull them from school but this requires first that you find out about it, which you may not be able to do until they come home singing the 14 words to a Wagner melody. It is impossible to effectively police all the media your child might consume unless you plan to isolate them from the world at large.

Hell, jontron was innocuous for a while. A parent could have reviewed his entire oeuvre up to a point, however many days of video it would have required, and decided it was alright. Until a week ago, when suddenly it was not alright! And by the time a parent is aware of it and is shielding their children from it, they have already been exposed, at least for a bit. Jontron built an audience when he was safe and failed the responsibility he adopted when he decided to influence children by exposing them to his abhorrent views, and there was very little a parent could do about it.

Moreover, it's not just about _my_ kids being exposed to racist bullshit. I also want for _other_ kids to be shielded from it (this is beyond my power without going to the source of the bullshit and shutting it down directly). Otherwise, my kids may still be cursed to live in a world where they are threatened for their heritage.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#66

Post by alva »

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 now quote you in the news saying you wrote "Death to Jews" online.

And that is pretty much what all of this is about.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#67

Post by coldtea »

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".

You just wrote the phrase "Death to J..." on HN. You are obviously an anti-semite worse than PewDiePie, who didn't even hold the sign himself. That's the level of attack on him, and your comment is not helping either.

Also, are you so sure we won't find something similarly damning in your whole life, or even in just in your past month?

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#68

Post by jerf »

FilterSweep wrote: post #20
thieving_magpie wrote: post #9

That was a long article that could be summed up by: "Sometimes people say stupid things. Most don't record and publish it for the world".

I was disappointed to find out the laser-focus was on scandals related to youtube celebrities, and not on the infrastructure youtube has that creates youtube celebrities. The author mentions Game Theory (another youtube channel) which has some videos that delves into these mechanics instead. My fear with Youtube as a casual viewer is that content creators (such as the author) are too focused on scandal with other cha…

"The author mentions Game Theory (another youtube channel) which has some videos that delves into these mechanics instead."

I saw one of them about YouTube reprioritizing its recommendation algorithms to prioritize channels that A: release every day and B: prefer longer videos to shorter videos, in order to drive "engagement", that is, people staying on YouTube longer rather than shorter.

The problem here, to me, seems to be that basically what YouTube wants out of its channels is in excess of what one person can produce anymore. Not just "produce" in terms of producing raw minutes of video per se, but produce in terms of writing, too. Even the most interesting person in the world would have problems being "interesting" for an hour or two, every day, day after day, if only because the very activities one needs to become "interesting" are themselves inhibited by the needs of this video schedule.

YouTube is basically telling individual content producers to eat their seed corn, which is the only way to maintain this for any period of time at all, so that YouTube's engagement numbers will boost. But how long will YouTube's numbers boost while it also encourages its biggest content producers to eat their seed corn?

I've already unsubscribed from a couple of channels that tried to adapt to this format. (I mean, I feel for them, but it's no help to anybody for me to suffer through it.) I've got a couple of others that have gone from me watching everything they put up on a weekly basis, to seeing several weekly-esque shows being jammed on to the same channel to make YouTube think it's got engagement, where I'm still only interested in the once-a-week bit, but now my subscriptions page is clogged up. And I've seen channels go from producing relatively tight 10-15 minute things to splaying out to hour+ videos, with little-to-no increase in content. The only channels that I like that have not been negatively affected by these changes are the ones that simply ignore all this crap and just keep doing their thing. A couple I've got covered on Patreon, the others are just labors of love that now have basically 0 chance of ever having any sort of "success". Which isn't intrinsically a problem for them either, as they know this; the questions it raises to me are not about those channels, but about the future of YouTube. Not whether it has a future, but what that future is. It seems like it's becoming harder to find niche content to me.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#69

Post by kmonsen »

empath75 wrote: post #62
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…

He makes enough money to hire writers.

And a PR person to let him know what is too far and how to handle issues.

Re: Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

#70

Post by nicky0 »

jrkatz wrote: post #31
krige wrote: post #4

It's not implosion, it's just the outrage crowd setting their sights on a new target and gaming sites trying to settle score with the new media.

'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.
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