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 interesting case as he's far and away the biggest "real" channel on youtube (i.e. not VEVO or one of the generic youtube channels).
The controversy seems very click-baity to me, I read the articles and watched his response videos. It seemed to me that he made some pretty bad taste comments (if you've seen much of his content that shouldn't be a surprise) and the WSJ deliberately sliced it up to take it out of context and produce the most sensationalised headline possible.
All reminded me of the quote generally attribued to cardinal Richelieu.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
The pewdiepie controversy seems manufactured to me.
I get pewdiepies humor. I watch his videos anticipating his originality and I guess 54 million subs do for varying reasons.
His ability to express himself and generate content that makes me laugh repeatedly. He's not insensitive despite what some news articles say. The anti-semitism thing is so overused today its a little meaningless. The only way to push its worth is to generate headlines and articles to emphasis its importance.
He jokes broadly about every culture and only seems to have issues with one culture in particular, unsurprisingly.
It's reached a point it feels he's holding back something funny to please WSJ - a huge, huge tragedy and loss to his freedom and originality.
Ultimately, his freedom and originality haven't been impinged; if he wants to say whatever he wants, he can make and host his own videos.
His freedom of speech doesn't override Disney's freedom of association or YouTube's freedom of the press; they're under no obligation to publish or promote anyone's content, and the counterweight to that is that people who don't like their policies can boycott them.
But you're unlikely to find a successful boycott organized around the notion that there should be no ramifications for paying strangers to hold up signs that say "Death To All Jews."
This is all correct -- but it underlines the awkward moral spot that Google (my employer) is in.
Our incentive is to pay lip service to freedom of speech while taking the path of least resistance and censor to keep angry 3rd parties happy. You might think this shuts down only speech beyond the pale. But we are still rewarding those who act most offended, and our wisest course is to kowtow more and more.
That stuff is no danger to a society when the soap boxes are distributed about land. But YouTube is a single platform in the position where it can one of the most effective censors of film on earth.
It is more more powerful in this field than any government, -- except those which can force our hand. Yet Google has the rights, and indeed duties of a private company. And that is a long-term danger to society and to the company.
If we stopped saying things that might "offend" someone somewhere there would be silence. What's interesting is, the more we try to silence certain voices, the louder their message gets. Does demonization (?) work? Does it back fire ? Take IS for instance. The stronger and more extreme the resistance (?) the stronger it gets.
I'm certainly not defending hate, etc. Just wondering - out loud - if the old countermeasure rules still apply.
There are things that are pretty unlikely to offend, things that are very likely to offend a lot of people, and things that are very likely to offend a few people (this kind of humor is often called "punching down" when the few are a low-power group and "punching up" when it's a high-power group).
Nobody is calling for zero offense; that's a slippery-slope argument that doesn't really apply to the situation. And nobody has silenced PewDiePie; he's completely free to continue to publish his content on YouTube (with proper community flagging, within the guidelines of the YouTube community, and even if he were no longer free to do so, he wouldn't be "silenced;" he'd just have to move his content to .mp4s hosted out of his own pocket).
What has happened is YouTube and Disney have both exercised their option to no longer pay the guy for being offensive, which they are perfectly within their rights to do.
In terms of the more general "Just wondering aloud" question: The old Streisand Effect is still in play, but the Internet is now a mature enough platform that it has "these sites" and "those sites." You can find all manner of things completely unacceptable to YouTube's community standards linked off of 4chan. Keeping them off of YouTube does probably make them a little harder for most web users to find (since YouTube's search, indexing, and relational systems are so convenient). That's likely working as intended.
Agreed. They are free to hire and fire whoever they want. But that's not my point. The question is this: Does marginalizing and demonizing - in the internet era - make fringe ideas weaker or stronger? Or is "there's no such thing as bad press" finally not true?
> It's reached a point it feels he's holding back something funny to please WSJ - a huge, huge tragedy and loss to his freedom and originality.
On the contrary. Its completely acceptable for PDP to say whatever he hell he wants. The problem is that he wants to be paid by Disney while doing it.
The USA has freedom of speech. PDP is legally allowed to say whatever he wants. Unfortunately, PDP's revenue stream is (or perhaps... was...) Disney. And Walt Disney did not like PDP's Jew jokes.
There's no censorship here. This is PDP losing a financial sponsor / financial backer. Welcome to the real world PDP, your sponsors actually care about what you say.
---------
Wall Street Journal can do whatever. People have made fun of PDP all the time in the past years. That's not what's hurting him right now. Its the loss of Disney as a sponsor.
What's interesting is ignoring his audience that identifies his sense of humor and understands the context of 'Death to all Jews'.
He wants what most people want, to make a living and Disney withdrawing as sponsor will likely not hurt. A bigger issue is WSJ and co efforts to have his ads pulled altogether.
Pewdiepie made his money off really really really young audience.. those of you old enough to make up your own judgement/mind and talk about it weren't the ones Disney really cared about.. It's the fact that MILLIONS of young viewers - aged 6+ (probably mostly 8 to 11 years old) watched something that tried to normalize something most kids in that age group shouldn't normalize...
If people feel he was "holding back his freedom" then Disney should NEVER have been a sponsor and WSJ did a service to wake up the community to sponsorship of content creators not creating content for the demographics in which his revenue was being generated.
my 9 year old used to love him, sang "this sammich doesn't have turkey on it" all the freaking time but now won't even admit his existence mostly because kids want to watch youtubers have fun and not hate.. even if its in satire - its not the right demographics..
His content has always been on the "R rating" side and is not intended for children. If showing some people holding up a silly side is the first thing that offended your sensibilities, you haven't been paying attention.
While using the "anti-semitism" label is overused today (I once heard Rush Limbaugh say a Jewish person was an anti-semite), calling someone an anti-semite who had someone hold up a sign that says "Death to all Jews" is not exactly a stretch. When he was making fun of those other cultures, did he say "Death to all _______ (other culture)"?
Holding up a sign that says "Death to all X" is not definitive proof of hatred of X. If so, comedians/satirists are the most hateful group of people to have ever existed.
Would it be illegal for Disney to encourage or indirectly fund a hit piece on PewDiePie? It's very likely the OP here is right: YouTubers are imploding. Disney probably is the first to see that(they acquired Maker Studios a year or so ago) and needed to offload a massive failing asset.
The anti-semitism problem is a very specific angle to take particularly related to Disney and PewDiePie. Someone clearly combed his trove of videos and found every single Nazi reference; seem like a stretch to begin with. Idk theories.
Replying to myself, since I can not edit it anymore.
I know it sounds all funny and stuff, but if someone is curious about how context, in this case at least the statements exposed curator pewdiepie, matters, Foucaults 1969 essay "What Is an Author?" is a great starting point to dig into:
> "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
I really don't think what he did was "honest" i.e. not meant to be provocative. As many sibling comments have pointed out, if you're making a living as a public personality, you kinda have to accept a higher level of scrutiny simply in order to avoid media hit jobs.
Oh I wasn't suggesting that what he said wasn't meant to be provocative, the main instance they picked up was ill considered and in bad taste, but then if you watch any of his other videos this really shouldn't be a surprise.
The hit job was some of the other items they'd cut together to make the "anti-semetic" charge stick. One item where he was comparing youtube policies to those of the Nazi's (i.e. casting both in a negative light) the WSJ used as "proof" he was pro-Nazi. that's what prompted my thought of the quote.
A recurring pattern I've seen with online celebrities is that when they get popular enough for more mainstream media to notice them, they're suddenly held to the standards of mainstream sensibilities and judged in a mainstream light that can be very incompatible with their brand.
And their fans then defend them with "If you've seen their other stuff, you'd know that isn't unusual," which is a pretty thin defense---a bit like defending an arsonist with "Oh sure, nobody cared when they burned down all those grocery stores, but now that the WSJ is reporting on that orphanage..."
No. The whole reason pewdiepie and other personalities on youtube have such high viewership is because mainstream media hasn't had anyone funny for decades. Anyone fresh, honest or even just equally offensive to every group has been purged from the airwaves for being politically incorrect. Even Dave Chappelle is getting in hot water for jokes that no one would have objected to 10 years ago.
I don't see how what you're saying opposes what fixermark is saying. Sure mainstream media may not be providing good material, but the way to fix this isn't to not hold people accountable for their actions.
If holding people accountable for their actions kills a joke, the joke wasn't very good. This is one of the points slowbeef makes in the essay; part of the reason YouTube let's-players end up offending is the nature of the project doesn't leave them time to simmer jokes long enough to be good.
> There’s an apparent double standard, right? Comedians tell AIDS jokes, Holocaust jokes, 9/11 jokes and much more. When a popular YouTuber does it, it’s suddenly being reported by the media (and, cough, other YouTubers). Didn’t George Carlin once say no topic is off limits?
> There really is a joke there somewhere at Fiverr’s expense, and I think that’s what he was going for.
> The parts are there, loosely, if you cock your head and squint a bit. There’s an air of exploitation (on Fiverr’s part, but also often claimed to be on PewDiePie’s part) but it was a rush job. Seinfeld, in contrast, maps out goofy jokes about Pop Tarts down to the syllable.
I read and understood what slowbeef wrote. Delivery is the unmentioned point of discussion -- landing the delivery. It's the difference in whether a joke is funny or not. But changing delivery keeps the raw essence of the joke the same.
And I don't think it's fair to call it "holding someone accountable", if the same raw essence of a joke told with better delivery is suddenly OK. It's the same accountable action. If you're really interested in "holding someone accountable", shouldn't the same raw essence of a joke be wrong no matter how it's delivered?
I don't disagree that delivery is extremely important to landing a joke and it being funny. I do disagree that holding people accountable for bad delivery of a joke is somehow a moral impetus. That good joke was just as morally bad as the bad joke.
In other words, you could have taken a lot of George Carlin's material and run it through the ultra-politically-correct filter and come out deaf from the blaring alarms. But he's somehow above moral reproach because he's good at it? I don't buy it.
I think all this really goes back to the idea: Only the fool can criticize the king. Anyone else, and it was grounds for treason. I would have hoped we moved beyond that model.
I think the point is that there is no king. Or rather, kings are manufactured at will based on outrage, and outrage is dependent on delivery. Land the joke, and no one calls treason on you. Whiff and there's an angry mob with pitchforks.
I think that's why you see a lot of people saying that none of this was surprising for people who knew his material before hand. And I think the comparison elsewhere to shock-jocks is very apt. Such material is often suddenly found lacking when it gains an audience wider than it was targeted for.
And this also plays into the wider idea of, how responsible should a speaker be for "triggering" [0] a listener? That's a very heavy burden when your audience suddenly -- and not necessarily intentionally -- becomes "everyone".
[0] Yes, this is a somewhat lax usage of that term. However, it is also a common usage, so I use it as such.
which is not the point I was referring to , nice way to take my comment of out context. For avoidance of doubt I originally said
("The hit job was some of the other items they'd cut together to make the "anti-semetic" charge stick. One item where he was comparing youtube policies to those of the Nazi's (i.e. casting both in a negative light) the WSJ used as "proof" he was pro-Nazi. that's what prompted my thought of the quote.")
My point was the the part where they conflated PewdiePies comparison of Youtube and the Nazi's as being him supporting the Nazi's, this was entirely take out of context. I wasn't referring to the sign there at all.
And on the other side, if you're someone who gets raised to a public personality for your liveliness and lack of filter, you're likely to step over the line eventually.
One of the best points I've seen was that Youtubers have a lot in common with talk radio hosts. When Howard Stern said something offensive, it was a bit rich to act surprised. He was paid to be shocking, he did better the harder he pushed on the edge of acceptable, and so of course he eventually went too far. Everyone from PewDiePie to Penny Arcade have run into the same issue.
(Under this framework, JonTron is a fundamentally different issue - he doesn't seem to have been looking for views, just melting down.)
Howard Stern is a terrible example: his advertisers knew exactly what they were getting.
PDP, unless he's stupid, should have known what DISNEY wanted. And it's not anti-semitic jokes, particularly following repeated use of Nazi iconography in his videos.
PDP was popular before Disney became involved, if Howard Stern's advertisers knew what they were getting then Disney should have known as well. You provide Stern an excuse but then deny the same excuse to PDP.
Notably Stern's employers and advertisers seemingly didn't know what they were getting, as judged by their decision to drop him for racist comments. Maybe they should have known, maybe they knew but figured they could profit and then drop him when he screwed up, but they did hire him after his success and drop him later.
You're right that it exactly mirrors PDP's situation: off-the-cuff, inflammatory content creator partners with advertisers, does something extra-inflammatory, gets dropped by same.
The public outrage at what you perceive to be a "media hit job" is unlikely to come.
What you're witnessing is mainstream (pretty much) America rejecting something they're now aware of that's too outside the norm. PDP can keep making content, but there's not really a likely scenario where he gets paid by Disney to do it.
This. I don't understand why the people who like PDP's content should care about him not being being able to get money from mainstream agencies such as Disney. He hasn't been banned from youtube, he can pretty much continue doing what he's always been doing. But those endorsements are predicated on certain restrictions...
> All reminded me of the quote generally attribued to cardinal Richelieu.
It's worse than that. Richelieu was talking about absolute power of the State. Now the online power is made up of hordes of folks whose only reason to exist is to make their views the predominant ones and silence anyone who's diverging from them, even if that person was simply joking. There's a surprising good share of folks who are anti-Freedom of expression especially in Gen X and Y. Anyone who lived during the 80s would find the present situation intoxicating.
No need to restrict this to generations; I think there always has been a core crowd out there who are outraged, shocked, offended, etc. for various reasons. Bartweiss's HN comment where he compared these type of Youtube hosts with morning radio shock jocks (which really had their peak in the 1980s and 1990s) rings true to me; there was plenty of controversy and public outrages etc. during those times when one of them "went too far".
(Besides, I think that the "outraged" crowd often shoots themselves in the foot. If the content is not terribly out of taste, then the controversial content often get an added allure that may make it more popular. This was even true in much older times, books that were "banned in Boston" in the early 20th century often became more popular as a result...)
Oh, I think this is very different now from when it was happening back in time. Back in the 60s-80s, younger generations were the ones actually fighting for the Freedom of Expression. Nowadays the younger generation is the one pushing for harder stances to make people shut up. Look at safe zones in university campuses, it's actively enforced by students themselves.
The safe community spaces on college campuses are honestly doing the opposite of what you suggest, generally giving people the opportunity to speak without fear. An example being communities where LGBT students can speak without fear of being targeted by homophobia, transphobia or otherwise. It's not unusual for communities to create rules to help foster dialogue and make its members feel safe being in that community
Uh, safe for the minority perhaps, but not safe for anyone who would dare to express any contradicting views. Imagine if someone said they thought their was no such thing as being gay, or said that they didn't think being trans was a real thing. Do you think the "safe zone" would be "safe" for them? At least in my perspective it's a very one-sided, anti-freedom of expression movement. It seems ignorant of me for so many which support them to overlook this.
To pick a hopefully neutral example, should it be "safe" for you to go to a chess club meeting and diss everybody there because you think Go is superior? They'll ask you to leave, and rightfully so.
It's a good thing to have these small "bubbles" for all sorts of minorities in which they get to define the rules.
Where it gets more interesting is when it affects the broader public sphere. That said, the particular examples you gave are ones where you'd be rightfully excluded depending on how you approach the subject. The evidence seems pretty clear that being gay or trans are real things. It took me some time to figure that out, but I found that as long as I approached the topic in a civil way, others responded in kind.
The problem is that the kind of people who complain about "anti-freedom of expression" or "excessive political correctness" are usually not the kind of people who approach those topics in a civil way. They have a certain foregone conclusion in their minds, and aren't ready to accept anything that contradicts that conclusion. So naturally, they end up being (justly) excluded from the discussion.
Unsuccessful attempts, maybe, although I doubt it. These kinds of stories tend to be greatly exaggerated, so: citation needed.[0] Meanwhile, there have been actual laws (not attempts!) that criminalized deviation from the heterosexual norm not so long ago -- or even today in not-so-nice countries.
The point is: Yes, the public sphere is also changing, but it's changing slowly, and the participants of the discussion who see a danger to freedom of speech are >95% hysterically exaggerating.
Meanwhile, it's good to keep in mind that there are <5% crazies in every group, including chess players and LGBT people. Listening to them is never a good idea.
[0] When you dig down, what you usually find is some minor committee discussing whether they should change the language used in their own bylaws and/or publications. I.e. it's not legislation, nobody is being forced to do anything, and most of these initiatives don't even pass in the first place.
> a. Intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun or title. For example, repeatedly calling a transgender woman “him” or “Mr.” after she has made clear which pronouns and title she uses
[snip]
> And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.
If that were literally all it was about, nobody would have reason to complain. Instead, the concept has expanded out to encompass political views which can be debated in good faith. Supporting certain candidates has resulted in public shaming, if not outright violence.
Do our college students really need to be kept "safe" from mere disagreement?
When "mere disagreement" is something like "I don't think you should have the same rights as me because your sexuality/gender/class/religion is different" then, uh, yes. E.g., depriving LGBTQ people marriage because of your "religious" beliefs is not a political view. This can be hard to understand if you come from a position where you've never had to deal with any issues like that. But for people in those groups, it's important to have a place where you can be with like-minded people and talk about those issues without someone taking over the conversation and making it about themselves and /their/ group.
"I don't think you should have the same rights as me because your sexuality/gender/class/religion is different"
Quite the opposite. Typically safe space warriors are demanding that people have different rights in public based on their genetics, not the same rights.
E.g. "You're a white man so shut up, I should have a special right to speak over you because of [XYZ]."
> When "mere disagreement" is something like "I don't think you should have the same rights as me because your sexuality/gender/class/religion is different" then, uh, yes.
Part of maturing is learning how to stand for one's ideas and beliefs, as well as learning how to deal with (bigoted) opposition to those. Isolating yourself, locking yourself in the echo chamber will make you unprepared for dialogue with those outside of it, or worse, will end with you radicalizing because you'll grow up with your standing never contested.
This is also going the other way. If you'll remove yourself from discourse, you will willfully marginalize yourself. How can local population know that LGBT people are living among them and are their friends/relatives/normal folk, if those people will lock themselves up in their safe spaces?
My favorite example when it comes to LGBT is polish activist turned politician, [Robert Biedroń](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Biedro%C5%84), who has spent life being vocal and visible activist for LGBT rights - extremely courageous feat in mostly catholic and conservatist Poland. The culmination of his work was gaining enough popular support to become mayor in 100k large city.
If this guy ran in my city, he'll get my vote. Even if I disagree with 90% of what he says because politically he always aligns himself with socialists and I'm moderate, I believe that what he does for making our society less bigoted is worth every support.
Now ask yourself, how many such Biedrońs will not come to be because they'll close themselves in their small worlds in fear of their feelings being hurt by some bigots?
If you disagree with 90% of his policies, but you vote for him anyway because of his LGBT activism, you're no better than racists could also disagree with 90% of a white man's policies, but still vote for them because their opponent was black.
I know you'll argue against that point, but I mention it not for you, but to put what you said into context for other readers.
Actually, I fail to see the point you are making. I'm arguing that people should be active in shaping popular discourse of their societies while honing and validating their opinions as they clash those with other opinions.
Is your argument "oh, but racists are also shaping discourse of their societes"?
I think that the power of hordes of folks to try to make their views the predominant one is nothing other than a cynical phrasing of democracy, right? What is political freedom, if not the ability to work with like-minded others to advocate for or against a viewpoint? Should we censor people who wish to engage in this right?
And I am confused how anyone here was silenced. This person's views, and the views of everyone who objects, and the views of everyone who objects to the objection, are all public. The video is easily available. Discussion forums that have nothing to do with his usual material, like this one, are discussing it. There's rich public debate about what he said and why he said it, fueled by an independent press that is not constrained to write only what serves those in power (any sort of power), and fueled even more by social media.
This seems like the epitome of freedom of expression. If I saw someone say "Hitler was right" and nobody commented on it, I would wonder where freedom of expression went!
Remember that the position that Hitler was indeed right is not one that lacks for support. The third Google result for me for 'pewdiepie hitler' is from The Daily Stormer, an actual, non-joking Neo-Nazi website, and the comments are celebrating how PewDiePie's viewers are being "red pilled" into understanding that Hitler's position is defensible.
There's a difference in airing grievances, political opinion, public discourse, etc, and the lynching of people outside your view with a specific intent of silencing and destroying their very lives. This vindictiveness is explicit and widespread.
The very notion of "I disagree with you (and will bring it to light) but will defend your right to say it" seems to be dead in modern outrage culture.
No, your problem specifically is you support PDP's right to air anti-semitic jokes following repeated use of nazi iconography, and further, don't believe I or others have a right to react in any way beyond your preferred way.
PDP: HA HA HA dead jews
His advertisers and many audience members: Not cool
white-flame: But my free speech!
PDP remains free to make any jokes he desires; he's just not free to continue to get his preferred advertising revenue or outlets.
I agree with geofft, "lynching" is a really strong word for this. I'm also of the opinion that freedom of speech also means freedom of association, and the bigger story here is Disney deciding they did not want to associate with PewDiePie after the WSJ asked them about his comments.
Celebrities, unfortunately, are going to get hit when they say or do things that could piss off a bunch of people. I mean look at Muhammad Ali. He refused the Vietnam War draft as a religious conscientious objector. They stripped his title, his endorsements, and banned him from boxing. Not only that, but the appeals court did not even consider the merits of his case when they upheld the conviction. Or how Charlie Chaplan's passport was revoked after a FBI smear campaign and accusations of communism.
I understand people tend to look at current events in a vacuum, but saying something provocative and only losing endorsements is historically pretty good. Not even 50 years ago he would have had his passport revoked, been falsely accused of a crime, or some shady bureaucracy would have opened a file on him.
"Lynching" seems to be exaggeration here, since nobody appears to be actually dying. I mention this not because I'm upset about that word, but because I disagree with the basic claim that anyone's lives or livelihoods are being destroyed. PewDiePie's account is unsuspended and he's actively posting to YouTube. He doesn't have a Disney sponsorship any more, but I don't believe he particularly has a right to a Disney sponsorship. He's welcome to make a living however he wants, just like anyone else. And just like anyone else, his past work will impact his future prospects; if I play a bad joke on my coworkers, my future employment prospects as a sysadmin will likely be limited, too. That is part and parcel of making sure that good work improves your future prospects, which seems like a desirable goal for a society.
I support PewDiePie's right to say whatever he wants. I posted a link to his own video in another comment. I am thrilled to bring it to light. I don't believe that defending his right to say it involves defending his right to receive corporate funding or popular appreciation for what he says; "I disagree but will defend your right" seems to imply quite the opposite to me.
I agree that if you find yourself destitute (or actually lynched) as a result of public outcry, your right to speech is impacted, but I don't believe there's ever been such a case. Can you point me to one?
> And I am confused how anyone here was silenced. This person's views, and the views of everyone who objects, and the views of everyone who objects to the objection, are all public. The video is easily available.
According to Pewdiepie, the WSJ pushed Google to suspend his Youtube account.
Sure, and it's been reposted on YouTube. My point is that the exact same powers that are allowing online hordes of folks to say "I don't like this" are also making it difficult to actually censor the viewpoint that isn't being liked. This is only a bad development if you're interested in censoring either of those. The best cure for bad speech is more speech!
I don't follow his channel for the impression you had about him. I like the other gamers (Van--s, H-0, etc).
I think you nailed it that stress is so bad that many have lost appetite to release new videos on a regular basis, and I've seen this in many youtubers I was following for years. Some gamers I know just don't want to edit anymore and instead release most of the gameplay or switch to Twitch completely and depends on just donation.
While the top youtubers can make over a million a year, it can become a no-life job in the end. There's also an impression at least from my PoV that many YouTubers are now in LA making LA their "Silicon Valley" (yes, after all LA is the SV for entertainment industry) but since the living standard there is pricey and different some YTers might be under unhealthy stress. There was a YouTuber who committed suicide last year. We don't know exactly why, but it was very unexpected for fans and friends, and while I really don't want to speculate, I just can't help but think career might contributed to the cause regardless.
Depends. I am going to name names now. Ray William Johnson was a comedian on YouTube and his channel was a big hit about 7-8 years ago. At some point he signed up with an agency and started having a production crew instead of making them off of his own room, but for me the quality had gone down dramatically. I am not sure if there's even a correlation, perhaps just timing that there weren't that many funny videos on YouTube worth reviewing or perhas is the script the crew was producing just wasn't the right fit for me. I was very displeased with the new videos he was releasing. Later he ended relationship with the agency after some dispute and ran with his own production team, but the quality has continued to suck and so I am no longer a subscriber. Sorry.
WongFu Production ran from a channel of three college students making videos about Asian life in America to a production company of its own (their made shorts, movies, and even a YouTube original series recently, and also making films for others). Their production quality is amazing. My favorite gamers on YouTubes just record from their computer and have no production crew whatsoever. I think Smosh Brothers is behind a production team at this point, and their videos are pretty fun to watch. It depends, there are good and bad ones.
> 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.
This is kind of related to the part of the story that informs you that you need weekly updates to stay visible to your subscribers because YouTube is weird. I'm not sure if that is true any more, especially with options like Patreon. I support 3blue1Brown and Primitive Technologies through it, and part of the reason I do is that they both take their time to produce quality videos.
The joke was that he was asking a bunch of people to do unreasonable things for $5 and someone else actually agreed to this. He went into it knowing it was unreasonable and thats the joke. We only hear about this, because no one else did the other crazy shit he suggested.
His other crazy shit was to pay someone to say "Hitler did nothing wrong".
When that guy, who was dressed as Jesus, was banned by Fiverr, Pewdiepie stated: "Isn't it ironic that Jews[1] found another way to fuck Jesus over?"
Whether his quest to push the comedy envelope extends further than Nazi/Jew related material, I don't know.
[1] Fiverr is based in Israel.
Edit: And the predictable downvote within minutes. How funny that the fans of Pewdiepie, and his "free speech", have such a reaction to a post stating objective facts about what he said.
I didn't downvote you, nor am I a fan. I only saw parts of the episode when a friend watched it, so I did not see it in it's entirety.
Is what you listed a complete listing of things he attempted to get through? Or just your selection of what he tried that was prejudice? It seems likely he also would have tried to get some other dumb things through on the level of dick jokes.
Do we really need the complete list of things he said before we can judge the wisdom (or lack thereof) of the headline-grabbing ones?
"Is what you listed the complete list of ingredients to this homeopathic medicine? Or just your selection of the poisonous ones? It seems likely they would have put in some other healthy things on the level of ginseng"
If you don't provide sufficient context, in any argument, then that is just cherry picking.
In this case, if the list contains mild things and racism, then its probably just that PewDiePie is racist. If the list contains nothing socially acceptable and some of it happens to racist well then clearly the whole thing was for shock value, and the racism was probably just a way to push your buttons.
I haven't seen him or any of his fans give any examples in his defence of other things he did that were not along the lines of "Hitler did nothing wrong" and "Death to all Jews", which I'd expect them to do if he'd done so.
The zealous petulance displayed by Pewdiepie fans in this thread over anything that doesn't try to excuse his anti-Semitic remarks and behaviour is really weird.
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.
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?
Who are you to police what we do or don't need in online gaming? Why is your definition of tactless behavior more valid than mine? All of this just seems like recreational outrage from the outside looking in.
Your opinions have consequences. They can affect other people in real ways. In this case, the imprecise, incredibly untrustworthy outrage of thousands of people -- fueled by a sensationalist media hit job -- almost ruined someone's career.
You're welcome to your opinion. But you also have to take responsibility for it.
There are countless millions of people with no careers at all. Clearly, our society doesn't believe in a right to having a career at all, let alone a right to keeping one's existing career.
If we're worried about the threat to PewDiePie's ability to make a living, to his life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, it seems like the fundamental problem is not with people on the internet having opinions, it is with the system where losing a career threatens all those things. Fix capitalism, implement a UBI, whatever, and then his loss of a career wouldn't seem like a threat to his ability to live a fulfilling life or to reach an effective means of speaking to people.
The same argument can be used to say, "Your opinions have consequences. In this case, shutting down the TSA's security theater program put a lot of TSA agents out on the streets. You have to take responsibility for it." Or "In this case, Edward Snowden almost ruined the careers of many NSA spooks who could never make it in the private sector." Or many similar things. Would you agree those are bad arguments for not fixing the TSA or reforming the NSA?
"Almost ruined someone's career" is such a stretch here. PewDiePie is a multimillionaire. He didn't almost lose his career, he almost lost a few business opportunities. Others like as not would have opened later. This is a very successful entertainer facing criticism; it's not analogous to a normal person being forced out of their job.
Can't this exact same argument be made to PewDiePie? He is welcome to make whatever kind of jokes he wants, but 'his opinions have consequences.' If he makes a joke that causes people to write articles criticizing him, then that is a natural consequence of telling those types of jokes.
Just like no one gets to decide what kind of jokes are allowed to be told, no one gets to decide how someone reacts to those jokes.
Yes, and it should be. I took it for granted that this sort of argument is already applied to celebrities. The unexpected/counter-intuitive part of my claim is that it should also apply to the people writing one-off tweets that they think are harmless and that nobody will read.
If you're talking about the tweet by IAC's global head of communications, I would like to opine that tweets by a global head of communications for a major media company should possibly be considered more like tweets by celebrities than tweets by some bored high school kid.
We do have a serious problem that someone can say things in what feels like private, to what feels like a private audience, and they can attract a global audience very quickly. I said lots of dumb stuff both in person and online (on AIM or Xanga or something) as a teenager, and those are gone from the internet and that is very good. That seems to no longer be true for today's teenagers. I'm worried about this, and I'm specifically worried about the inevitable media circus once the generation that grew up on Facebook and Twitter starts running for elected office. Democrats will be vilified for liking Ayn Rand for a few weeks in 10th grade; Republicans will be vilified for liking Karl Marx for a few weeks in 11th. If you remember the hullabaloo over that one Bernie Sanders college essay, imagine that, 24/7.
But I don't see the "destroyed their career" argument being applied to teenagers; I see it being applied to people who basically have communication as their job. PewDiePie's entire career involves making as many people as possible watch him talk about things. Of course people are going to have opinions on what he says, and of course his career is going to be affected by whether the general public likes what he has to say. That's the career he chose.
Yeah, and people saying "Death to Jews" managed to murder six million of them. Yet apparently you think that is funny and beyond reproach, while taking issue with it is a serious problem.
Strangely, it takes time and maturity for people to realize the difference between being criticized for airing cruel or insensitive humor on an internet video venue and being locked in a cell and tortured for their political views (as in a police state).
Sure. The question gets fuzzier when you publish on something like the WSJ that has a reach of millions.
Example: If an anti-vaxxer published their opinion in a private blog, you'd probably be OK with their speech (as misguided as it is). If the same person started promoting their "opinion" using a national newspaper, you'd be a lot more upset.
Moreover, it's documented that the WAJ article authors went after PDP's livelihood directly (they contacted youtube and Disney, PDP's sponsor) with their allegations and were successful when Disney dropped PDP and Youtube cancelled PDP's new show!
It's kind of off topic in the thread though. Sure, GP didn't like it, a lot of people didn't like it. That's beside the point. You're allowed to not like things, and people are allowed to publish (most) things you don't like. It doesn't add anything to the discussion to state you don't like it.
Some people would rather no one can get the content than simply not consuming it themselves. It's not enough that they don't see it: No one should, because they know what's best.
Are those articles advocating that youtube ban him from the site? Are they arguing that he should be arrested, or prohibited from creating his content? I don't think they are.
What the articles critical of PewDiePie are saying is, "here is what he said and why we think it is offensive and why we no longer watch his channel. If you agree with us, you should also not watch his channel"
Everyone is free to read this opinion and then decide for themselves if they agree with the writer, or if they want to keep watching. If it turns out that so many people agree with the articles that PewDiePie no longer has an audience large enough to sustain him, then that sucks for the people who DO want to keep seeing him, but is just reality. If not enough people want to watch content of a certain type to sustain the producer, then that content will not be produced.
The underlying assumption behind free speech, free assembly, the public sphere, democratic assembly, etc. is that some ideas are better than others, that people can argue about these ideas and determine which ones are better, that other people will be convinced by rational argument, and that society is better when the better ideas win.
I don't think this is quite what you're saying, but "Why is your definition better than mine" reminds me of a lot of discourse I see about free speech, where free speech is an inherent virtue, and you should be able to say whatever you want to say without anyone doing anything about it - neither censoring it, nor objecting to it, nor listening to it with a critical ear or responding with anything other than "Yay, speech."
This seems to me to be the most fatal form of censorship. We're essentially sandboxing speech. Say whatever you like, as long as it doesn't actually mean anything. Participate in public debate, as long as it doesn't change. Respond to others, as long as you don't dare to claim that any idea might be wrong. What is the point of free speech in such a society?
If all ideas are equally valid, or at least the ideas of the inside crowd are valid and outsiders get a "who are you" response, why do we even try to have a democratic society? Just let the king do what the king wants, or the CEO do what the CEO wants. Comment and criticize all you want, as long as it doesn't have an effect.
But if we believe in there being a point to free speech, we should respond to speech with "Why do you believe that, and can you try to convince me that I am wrong while I try to convince you that you are wrong" instead of "Who are you to disagree with me".
well I'd argue some of the WSJ quotes were deliberately taken out of context which changed their intention (specifically the one where PewDiePie compared Youtube's policies to those of Nazis (i.e. in a negative light) the WSJ straight up took that out of context and applied a meaning it did not have.)
That said tactless behaviour is unwelcome in online gaming.... really? I'm not a big gamer but large swathes of the community seem to be pervaded by tactless behaviour, PewDiwPie is hardly alone in that.
The fact that he's got 54 million subscribers implies that a decent proportion of the online gaming community are not averse to that style of content, for better or worse.
This goes well beyond 4chan. I've seen the "Hitler did nothing wrong" meme on popular subreddits thousands of times. It's so obviously an over the top absurd statement. It's very difficult to understand how people believed he was serious. This whole "controversy" is manufactured and based on deliberate misunderstanding to get clicks.
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 open up YouTube and there'll be something to watch. I'm committing so little time I don't need to really think about it before clicking (unlike say Netflix). On the other hand when I step back a minute I notice that the videos provide incredibly little value as opposed to usual entertainment sources. I could watch a crappy 20min sitcom and it may be deemed trash but it still has a story and characters it feels like it provides some value to me. I don't get that on YouTube. I've tried a variety of the most popular channels and some other stuff and it's largely memes and clickbait and something I forget about the moment I'm done watching.
It seems like a lot of the popular creators don't actually produce good content but instead have managed to built a personality cult around themselves that hooks very young people. I've noticed comments where people praise 'hustle' and 'content' and 'awesome product placement'.
Just interested on other people's thoughts on the platform and content.
Edit: Thanks for the replies everyone, very interesting.
I definitely spend a lot of my entertainment time watching youtube. I really agree what you're saying as far as big content creators not offering much substance to their videos, but it's wrong to think that the "big youtubers" are the only ones making things on Youtube. I have my subscriptions filled with some pretty amazing smaller youtubers who are making great, cerebral content all the time. I'm more interested in non-fiction, while it sounds like you're looking for fiction and story-telling, but I'll share some of my favorite channels anyway
Definitely some interesting stuff there so thanks for sharing. I do agree there is interesting stuff to be found I just find it really hard to see why the popular content is popular (other than the personality cult I mentioned). And I'm usually someone who is perfectly happy enjoying mainstream/popular content (I'm not that discerning) so found it odd.
I watch some youtube channels regularly. Broadcast TV and Netflix have economics that don't really allow for niche content.
For example, if you want to to watch someone take oscilloscopes apart [1] or tell you the amount of glass fibre reinforcing in different brands of electric drill [2] or pick hundreds of specially made locks [3] or watch hundreds of performances from a serious ballet competition [4] Youtube can provide that. Content like this wouldn't have any chance on Netflix or broadcast TV*
Of course, 99.9% of the content on youtube is absolute junk, and they do an awful job of highlighting stuff, the logged out homepage is full of absolute dreck, and so on. And I certainly don't see the creators I follow posting a video every day or any of that stuff.
Lectures, lectures, lectures!! I search for niche topics, restrict to videos 20 mins or longer, sometimes throw a "lecture", "talk", "speech", "debate", "discussion" etc tag into my search and watch those. There's a lot of amazingly dense insightful videos on youtube with <500 views. The only problem is that youtube is fantastically bad at making recommendations, their algorithm really only recommends the same speaker over and over again.
I would actually say restricting to 20 min or longer videos is a real key. I was looking for some information on backpacking yesterday. I did a couple searches, restricted to long videos, watched a few pieces of several of them until I found one I really liked then dug into the channel that made it.
Very much this. Between Stanford, MIT, harvard , Yale and Berkeley, I find great lecture content I hope never goes away. Otherwise I find that finding a particularly articulate author or person and searching for all their material is another way to do this.
I spend most of my 'entertainment' time on youtube these days, but I'm not looking for sitcoms and character development. I'm also older than you. I spend most of my time watching interviews (financial, political), podcasts, and special interest informative stuff. I don't like censorship, and even on popular (main)streaming sitcoms, only certain viewpoints are allowed to be expressed.
I watch a lot of YT, usually 1-2h per day. It's often on in the background while I do something else.
I watch a lot of "let's play" and other game videos, mostly with well known YT personalities. Their format may be different than a "crappy 20min sitcom" but their value is the same, entertainment. You don't watch a sitcom for the story, you watch it to turn your brain off and laugh.
Just like a sitcom you get more out of YT videos if you've watched the whole series. There will be running jokes and references.
Keep in mind that a lot of top YT content is targeted at 12 year old boys. Unless you fit the demographic you're not going to enjoy it. Keep trying other channels. There are so many people on YT putting out quality content that it's nearly impossible to not find something you'll like.
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.
>> my favourites are Casey Neistat [2], mainly just from the production quality point of view
Cool, thanks for the reply. This is one of the channels I'm following. I have seen the occasional cool video (there was a motivational one a few weeks back I loved[0]) but largely it's just some dude running and not doing/saying very interesting things. You mention production quality which is interesting as one of the types of comment I see often on his and other videos is "awesome transition/angle/effect" (he even did a video last week where the premise was "here's a cool new transition I'm gonna use for the next 10 mins".
I watch the people you mentioned plus I love movies so I also watch KaptainKristian, Every Frame A Painting, Lessons From A Screenplay, Channel Criswell.
Just in case you haven't heard of them In A Nutshell and Life Noggin are also awesome for well produced super high quality science stuff
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.
As someone who is just a bit over the age of 40, I do spend most of my TV watching time with Youtube. However, my viewing habits are not for watching these channels in question. I'm more into the killing 10 minutes paradigm. I choose Youtube because I can search for something I'm interested in, get a bunch of hits, and just pick one. If I like it, I let it keep going, if not, I skip it or just turn it off. I don't like investing a lot of time in searching through the Netflix/Hulu catalog, and eventually deciding via "meh".
As far as these types of popular or personality cult channels go, I pass. I don't understand the draw. I understand the ones where you watch people play video games; that makes sense. What I don't understand is watching people open boxes, reaction videos (where you watch someone react to a video they are watching), or those videos where people are complaining about something/someone on Youtube/Twitter/Facebook/Snapchat and how that affects them.
(He's also just an interesting, motivating person)
There are some other, really good channels about machining (precision metal working):
Oxtoolco, Keith Fenner's channel.
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I think the thing about youtube that made it click for me was watching primarily content that is at least somewhat educational. I know a lot more about sailboat cruising because of watching delos than I did before, and as a guy living in landlocked Phoenix AZ, that is pretty cool :)
I do. But the content creators I watch aren't "Entertainment", they're interesting and educational and that, to me, is entertainment.
I didn't discover the channels I watch based on popularity, but on what interests me. Occasionally I'll find another channel that puts out high quality and interesting content, and add it to my list, but it's not something I set out to do methodically. Most of the channels I watch have less than 500,000 subscribers and several have less than 100,000.
I've never watched one of Pewdiepie's videos, or anything remotely resembling one of his videos, and have never had the slightest inclination to do so. He might as well be living in a different world.
That said, I find Youtube to be invaluable as a platform and don't feel the time I spend on it to be in any sense wasted.
Sturgeon's law is very much in effect. I suspect Youtube is especially predisposed to encouraging clickbait and low-effort content. It's all a matter of finding the quality stuff at the long end of the tail.
Does anyone here spend much of their usual 'entertainment' time watching YouTube
Yep, although it's usually in the background while working or reading as with most entertainment nowadays. My YouTube to TV ratio is easily 3:1. It's really all down to what you subscribe to. You can make it as high brow, low brow, mixed, technical, non-technical, or whatever as you want - there is really a channel for everything and that's where it's even better than TV.
Now finding those great channels.. it's a HUGE discovery problem. I mean, I know what I'm looking for and am still surprised to find excellent channels I'd never seen before.
That conversation was had back in 2006 when Google acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion. Some things have changed then. Smartphones are better; HBO's now available wholly online; Hulu's trying to compete with Netflix, but they're terrible at it so Netflix's going strong. Justin Beiber managed to cross-over to mainstream fame though got his start on YouTube. Youtube added advertising and then made a subscription service with a terribad name. Facebook bought Instagram, then IPO'd, so did SNAP. None of that really affects YouTube though.
There are alternatives; Snapchat stories, Vimeo, AWS has a video distribution system available without Amazon branding. YouTube is still the defacto standard for "me and my buddies made a video and want to put it online for the world to see."
The lesson I've learned is that branding is everything. The technical side of putting up a video on website is easier than ever these days, thanks to the march of technology, but Youtube lives on.
I have put a lot of hours into Two Awesome Gamers, Epic Meal Time, and ERB, these days in that genre I watch Seth the Programmer, and Team Four Star. I stopped watching TAG when they fell apart, but for a long time they were pretty consistently decent. Epic Meal Time just lost their focus, Harley for a long time seemed to be phoning it in. ERB seems to be done.
My metric for content is if the videos seem to be improving or not. I'll keep watching if it looks like they're pushing at something other than just more eyeballs and cash. ERB's content just kept getting better and better, those guys are all seasoned entertainment industry veterans. Likewise for Team Four Star, they're all solid voice actors and they just get better and better at their craft.
If all you're trying to satisfy is an audience, your schtick gets tired quick.
I personally made huge leaps in empathy from watching boogie2988's videos about his struggles with weight.
It's important to note, however, that YouTube is first and foremost a kids network(kids video ads convert the best), and then secondarily a music network(music videos provide most of the audience growth). All the rest of the stuff comes way after those two in their priority list, so you have to wade through all the screamy reaction channels and music channels to scrape something wholesome for adults at the bottom of the barrel.
It's 100% like Reddit; the site is wonderful if you dig through and find the little corners that appeal to you. Yet skimming off the top tends to yield a lot of garbage.
The Alientube browser extension will display Reddit threads about a video (if available) in place of YouTube comments, which I've found is often a good way to find new channels as people discuss similar videos. The more you watch, the more good stuff you'll find. It doesn't all happen at once.
That seems like a perfect analogy. I hate 90% of the popular Reddit stuff (I don't even understand how people enjoy or find it funny) yet I got really into it after digging down into some subreddits.
I've been watching video game play through (typically with restrictions added on) videos from Japan on nicovideo for 10 years. I've seen the genre devolve (for me) from one based on skill, planning, research, and creativity, to one based off of a personality cult. It's been sad for me to see personally.
I watch a lot of crash course personally. They've continued to put out good content (well save for their recent cartography debacle). They are mostly funded through a single embedded ad, Patreon and some PBS deals it seems, so YouTube constantly changing rules doesn't seem to affect them too badly.
I mostly watch science, machining, DIY or electronics video. In the garbage section I only watch Casey Neistat and Ben Brown. That's the only kind of moving picture I watch unless I'm on a plane, I have no TV.
I regularly watch YouTube (I'm 27). I usually watch videos about woodworking, blacksmithing, machining, engineering, astronomy, math, chemistry, farming, and off-the-grid living. I find all of those valuable in that I learn something new nearly every time I watch one of those videos. That said, I also watch video game montages when I want a good laugh and some mindless entertainment.
Here are some of my favorite channels that I find watching almost always a good use of my time:
I cannot recommend Matthias' channel enough! He is absolutely amazing. I love the organic points in his videos where he messes something up and then fixes it and concludes "good enough". A true demonstration of the hacker mindset!
I believe he was a computer programmer full time before his YT channel and website took off. Watching him work makes me want to become a woodworker. Maybe someday I'll have the appropriate space and give it a shot!
I've recently started watching woodworking videos on YouTube. I read somewhere that Matthias was one of the early employees of RIM (Blackberry) and as it turns out, he has a bunch of those patents in his name: https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=ininvent....
Both my kids (17 and 6) do so I see them in passing. From my middle aged "dad" perspective it does concern me at the peurile nonsense that floods their brain...
I can't stand the typical Youtuber channels, which seems to be mostly vlogs with fast cuts. I guess they're a logical continuation of reality TV, people seem to like watching what others are watching, even if it's some stranger spouting inane drivel. I don't care about some stranger's vacation, even if there's fancy editing and expensive cameras. It's a bit sad that young people seem to spend more and more time with their phones and computers and substituting socializing with videos. I've heard the argument for let's play videos and vlogs that it's like sitting next to a friend.
You've already gotten lot's of great tips, I'll go ahead and list some more channels that I find interesting and/or entertaining. Youtube is what you make of it, unfortunately it's not very good at relevant suggestions. It depends on if you want to watch people build things, talk about science, drive expensive cars, British panel shows, etc.
Went into the article expecting it to be silly, but there were actually a ton of interesting insights, especially about how no one knows how to manage these celebrities.
Also, slowbeef is being humble; he literally invented the LP and curated the scene forever ago. His Metal Gear 2 annotated playthrough (from the mid-00s at the latest, I'm remembering HTML tables) was absolutely hysterical (at least to my teenage self), and was the only way I could read the earlier plot to that series at the time. He's also been able to figure out how to hack ROMs for translation that nobody else could and ran translation projects, like with Policenauts. He's a hero in the gaming community and totally underrated, so I'm always upset to not hear his name come up more often when people discuss Let's Plays.
There is ALSO a Long Play category for games, which is videos that do a full play through of a game with zero commentary, and in as few segments as possible. (Many longplays are just one video.)
slowbeef is more recently known as a part of the Retsupurae duo (https://youtube.com/user/retsupurae), a channel that I've been following since 2011 and has maintained high quality videos the entire time. (they used to riff on Let's Plays, but now they mostly riff on Flash games/Kickstarters) My personal recommendation is the Negotiator series of riffs: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo4M1tlpv9ruM7k2Pr_0auqL8...
Nice to hear the background context, I got the impression from reading that he has a much, much deeper historical wealth of experiences to draw on. Checked him out on Twitter and quite an interesting fellow. I also agree how salient this article hits points that are not specific necessarily to YouTube, but to the fickle beast of Entertainment as we know it. Fame is exceptionally passing in Music, TV, etc, and it stands to reason YT Content is, at least for now, going to follow that model in the US cultural style.
I highly recommend his policenauts play through for anyone who reads this site. He talks a lot about the romhacking process (the game had no English version until he helped patch it in)
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.
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 also help do damage control, which both Pewdiepie and Jontron (and I imagine most people) are clearly are terrible at.
(One difference I would draw is that I don't think PewDiePie is genuinely racist, he just made a really, really stupid joke. Conversely, JonTron was pretty clear about what he thought about undesirables polluting the gene pool...)
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.
I think that's fair (especially in light of some of the other racially and sexually off-color things he's done), and a good way to phrase it. I had tried to figure out how to say that in my initial comment, but I couldn't find the words for it. Thank you!
JonTron isn't going to lose his subscriberbase from this though... I doubt most of them care.
Personally I don't really, mostly because his personal views never come into play on his actual show. This kind of thing always happens when you get someone involved in comedy to participate in a serious discussion, you start realizing they have opinions and views that you may not like.
> JonTron isn't going to lose his subscriberbase from this though... I doubt most of them care.
I'm sure many of his casual viewers won't care (or even know), but spaces like his subreddit have a lot of people condemning him and saying they're done with his channel. That's the sort of thing that can eventually eat away at content quality by breaking your relationship with bigger fans - think of how Many A True Nerd depends on subreddit feedback to fix mistakes and guide playthroughs.
Again, "many of his casual viewers won't care". Several people elsewhere in this thread have observed that his subscriber count did dip, but normal growth has brought him back above that level already.
My point was a very specific one, which is that a lot of longtime viewers who heavily engaged with his content (e.g. posted at length on the subreddit) seem to have walked away from engaging or perhaps subscribing at all. I think that's damaging even if his viewer count doesn't tank, which is why I gave a specific example of how it could hurt a channel.
>My point was a very specific one, which is that a lot of longtime viewers who heavily engaged with his content (e.g. posted at length on the subreddit) seem to have walked away from engaging or perhaps subscribing at all.
On the contrary - a large number of them had little or no history on the subreddit and it reeked of a bizarre form of astroturfing with plenty of new accounts repeating very similar messages. To what end? No idea. He's popular enough that it is totally possible he had a number of subscribers that felt the need to join Reddit and speak out. But any long term fan would know Jon's opinions on such things. So if anything, they weren't the most engaging of fans and "no harm done".
It's not his youtube subscriber base that he should worry about, it's his advertisement / cross-promotion deals. He did a series with Disney on Star Wars, promotes Audible on his channel, in addition to other deals.
In response, many gamers are revolting and asking for refunds. Their reason is that Playtonic did it as a political move and games shouldn't be political. And a lot of "SJW" stuff. Playtonic, in response, is banning a lot of people from the Steam forums and refusing refunds. (I don't know if Playtonic is banning people for asking for refunds of them just being rude).
Even if his subscribers are not affected, his reputations certainly is. Frankly, I have no idea how these people make money/ make a living but their prospects for media endorsement (at least by mainstream companies) is effectively dead.
By that logic, everything everywhere is free if you are willing to accept the consequences. How reasonable the consequences of action are should be somehow part of the definition of freedom.
You are free to say that, just accept that someone can beat you up for it or harass your employer/girlfriend/boyfriend till they fire you or ...
As typical for these type of events, a relatively small proportion unsubscribed, which was completely counteracted by latent user growth in a couple weeks.
Why Is that so ridiculous. Humans are more powerful than their environment. No other species is. When you can craft the environment you exist in, the evolutionary pressures on you are correspondingly weaker. Have you wondered how mental disorders or chronic diseases still exist? You're not dropping any pills, you just sound like you talk about things you don't understand.
I feel like that article was just a bunch of more or less hypothetical scenarios where X did Y and then some other characters being in "our time" and yada yada.
I still have no idea what JonTron did, I guess he said something racist ... somewhere?
He had a debate that was cast on Twitch. Pretty good overview here (the subreddit is clearly hostile to Jon's opinions, but the original post is quality):
Okay, so... occasionally it comes up that I experimented with being a gaming youtuber as a way to escape some of the difficulties I was having with the SV ecosystem. I worked hard, I connected with other famous Youtubers, and bam, I was profitable (sorta) and producing content.
Everything in this article about a capricious Youtube is true. Everything in this article about the underappreciated difficulty of producing this content is true. I produced a lot of media, but I easily put 5x hours into it (it doesn't help I play simulation and builder games). Everything about how expensive and difficult that job is is true.
And it's also true that the communities of Youtube and their related satellites (a lot of fandom on Tumblr, SA's leftovers, 4chan, Twitter, even obscure stuff like GaiaOnline) are... They're hateful. People will find a reason to hate you. Your fans will pick fights in your name. You'll frequently get criticism from both sides of an issue, and they're not always as cut-and-dry as the PewDiePie Nazi joke cards were. I was threatened doxing by a 15 year old, I called in to the SF police to warn them that I was expecting my workplace to be SWATed because people were mad I was "an ally of the feminazi gay community".
But... Folks, at the end of the day none of this really excuses humor about rape, violence, racism, etc. And if you do cross that line because you're desperate or exhausted you do get an out. You can say Mea Culpa, apologize profusely, donate some revenue to charity and people move on. The PDP's particular crisis keeps hovering (besides his degree of exposure) is that he's decided to ally with the unrepentant, openly racist parts of Youtube like Sargon.
There is an implication from this article, as I read it, that it's inevitable that people will break down or make mistakes. I agree with this part, but it also implies that we should forgive unrepentant bad actors who effectively say, "It's about the money. I thought I'd make more if I had people put up cards making light of antisemitism."
That's not a new thought, and these consequences are not new consequences.
You're so right that the modern price of fame / celebrity attention is such a minefield. There used to be misguided or mentally unstable folks who would stalk or take things too far, but I think the amount of power modern tech / networks can be deployed for purposes of, well, being mean online has more real world affects than at first.
What I'm saying is that far too frequently by the time a young person who craves fame gets it, they're naive on how the system might chew them up and spit them out, and just as they're getting some valuable experience, their time has passed and they're forgotten to the sands of other failed acts.
It'd be an outright lie for me to say that some folks don't try and prove themselves by coming into conflict with a specific person more famous than them.
But I also think it's a somewhat inevitable outcome that as you become a focal point for attention you'd better be ready for said scrutiny and for you to be interpreted within the dialogues other people are having. Asking people to do otherwise is absurd, they cannot.
The internet has changed the nature of "fame". In the past, you needed to generally buy into fame. To be famous, you needed managers, publicists, etc. Media access was a limited resource that was handed out only to those that met approval.
This created in the audience certain expectations about what it means to be famous. Don't treat the audience wrong or do anything too far outside those expectations or face the audience's wrath.
The internet changed what it means to be "famous" because the internet is media access. Unfortunately, the sociology of the audience hasn't caught up and often still apply the old expectations.
In the past, it was possible to walk away from fame because it wasn't your normal life. Being famous was a job you could (usually) leave. However, a lot of people that have become famous through the internet cannot leave. It was their normal life that became famous. Tight coupling between fame and personal life causes or amplifies a lot of these problems.
For a much better explanation, I highly recommend watching Innuendo Studios' video essay "This is Phil Fish"[1]. In spite of the name, it isn't really about Phil Fish. It's about everybody who isn't Phil Fish and how they (miss-)handle internet celebrity.
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 greedy and shouldn't really be surprised when you finally push it too far.
Maybe I'm the asshole, but I just can't muster up sympathy to empathize with the plight of someone who makes millions of dollars playing video games and making off color remarks.
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.
>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.
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.
So errrrm...am I completely out of touch with the world for not knowing who PewDiePie is (or what the incident referenced was)? Why not explain that in the beginning? There's a link later but I kind of went through most of the article blindly.
I'm going to copy/paste a bit of a comment I made further down:
Let's Plays are videos where people play video games and commentate over them.
Fivrr is a site where people can offer small services for about five bucks.
Pewdiepie is a extremely famous youtuber who produces lets plays, and is especially popular with younger audiences. He got in trouble for playing some indian men on Fivrr to wave around signs with racist messages on them ("Death to Jews" IIRC) on camera as part of a joke. The joke was delivered extremely poorly, and even in context it just seemed really scummy. It understandably didn't go over well and lots of people wrote angry articles about it. It ended up with Disney, who were affiliated with him, disavowing him and ending that affiliation.
He is the largest youtuber, he has like 50M subscribers. Did a bit pretending to be a nazi that people took out of context alongside some other things, became a huge stupid controversy.
You were not alone in this. I read about him some weeks or months ago because of some newspaper that features a 'scandal' about him. IIRC something about Disney dropping him from their network (did not know they had a youtube network, and I'm not entirely sure if I remember that correctly).
Don't mistake uncensored for unfiltered - Dave Chappelle probably writes and tells a joke a hundred times before you ever hear it, and it gets filtered through a LOT during that time.
Nice example since his recent stand up routine is getting a lot of flack for supposed anti-LGBT statements (I haven't seen it yet so I can't say if they have any value). With regards to the Pewdiepie case I am on his side here the quality of jokes doesn't matter it was pretty clear that they weren't meant to be taken seriously and that should be it.
He certainly does practice a lot. He still talks about bombing on stage in his newest standup. One of my favorite bits is how he talks about Michael Richards imploding on stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kth0UOU5a_M
Why do entertainers whose viewers come for edgy jokes apologize for occasionally delivering a joke in excess of poor taste? It seems like most of the outrage comes from non-core audience members. It's a long-tail kind of thing. I'm willing to bet a big portion of any given entertainers' audience is willing to excuse the occasional bad joke for all the funny ones.
Some groups have louder voices than others when you make bad jokes at their expense. Why not say, "that's what this channel is about"? There are plenty of twitter personalities I follow that occasionally go on shit posting tirades but I ignore it because everything else they post is gold.
Seriously, why not say "fuck you this is what my channel is like if you don't like it don't watch"?
You think the people who walked out of Amy Schumer's show in Florida were her core audience? Why'd she apologize? She jokes about how bad her pussy smells. I mean, there's a certain group of folks who love her stuff and they probably aren't easily offended by her brand of vulgarity, but would light their clothes on fire at someone else's. To each his own. Find a niche and unabashedly own it. I mean... it got Trump elected.
Doubling down on or simply ignoring controversy seems to be the best course of action in today's outrage culture.
Look at Trump: He never apologizes for anything, and controversies and scandals slide off of him like they were nothing.
It seems so obvious to me that I've been tempted to try my hand at the crisis management business, but I fear a strategy of "do nothing" isn't very protectable.
Take fairly normal people doing fairly normal things and then expose them to millions of people who think they're great and who can directly comment to let them know they're great. Or that they suck. Or both.
Even the traditional distance-Holywood celebrity model makes people go crazy, but when you're letting people right into your life and they're encouraging you to do crazier and crazier stuff, you're either going to burn out or blow up.
Are we going to pretend none of this is done, including the article, just for the sake of creating drama and gossip?
Maybe I am trying to look too much into it, but it's pretty clear there's a network of content producers behind the scenes of all the famous Youtubers, doing all the editing, selecting 'crappy' thumbnails, and playing the videogames on which the stars will later put their own voice over.
Doesn't this make a lot more sense than assuming some youtubers are supernatural and can churn out content by the hour?
I don't really watch any of the youtube or twitch personalities but I am aware of them. So from my perspective it seems like these are people in their 20s so it shouldn't be surprising that they make bad choices. That being said, they are bad choices and they should be criticized for them.
I think the article makes a good point that it is kind of amazing that Disney bought Maker Studios but doesn't seem to be putting in the work to make sure their employees don't do something stupid.
>Now, imagine your business hinges on all these random changes.
I have a hard time finding much sympathy for this argument. When you build your business on top of somebody else's business, you get to be subjected to their whims. that's how it works. If you wanted complete control over your platform, you're welcome to host your videos on your own website. And then you can see how many people view them, and the value that youtube is providing.
I see Youtube acting as a buffer between the wishes of the content creators and the wishes of the viewers as a big part of their value. I subscribe to a few channels, but i absolutely don't want a push notification every time any channel i subscribe to uploads a new video. that would be annoying as hell, and i'd stop subscribing to channels if that was the default behaviour. But that seems to be what the author of this article wants. For me, the fact that youtube is exerting some control to make sure their channels don't abuse notifications is a great thing.
Does Google's YouTube group host a line of communication between its product managers and content producers? Is there a service agreement between Google and its content producers around features and site behavior that will impact viewers and paychecks?
If not, then content producers are simply in a bad long-term position and they need to start looking for leverage against it, whether it's taking their subscribers elsewhere or getting a seat at Google's table so website and mobile app updates don't start mucking with subscribers getting their content to users.
OTOH, as a user, I don't want to be inundated with notifications and especially begging notifications if I unsubscribe to someone.
YouTube has a lot of flack for not communicating well with creators. Things only get done if lots of pans are run when the creator makes a video on how limited the channels of communication are with YouTube.
I remember Eli the Computer guy talking about how he got two community strikes on some really old videos and couldn't really appeal (I don't think they supported it at the time) it. It wasn't until he made enough noise that he was finally able to get a rep from YouTube.
YouTube is a good platform and I can't think of any competitors as good as YT, but they really need to improve communication with the creators.
There are plenty of those as well and much more enjoyable, especially if you don't want to put $60 + 20h into a game and just experience the story in the background.
>On a platform that changes its rules on the fly, all the time.
Is there, or has there ever been, a platform that doesn't change the rules on the fly, all the time? I'm not talking about video alone. Tastes in comedy, music, film, and books change yearly. The requirements to become successful on any platform are always in flux and never totally clear. Survivorship bias abounds.
Also, I have very little sympathy for anybody making videos about gaming. Mindless drivel. If you can't keep up, it's because the market is saturated and your product or execution is not as good as your competitors.
> If there is someone who’s making the stuff you enjoy ..., find ways to contribute. If they have alternate payment systems like merchandise or Patreon, consider it so they don’t have to play the “ad revenue works in volume” game.
Do this.
I support a number of creators via Patreon, including Daily Tech News Show and Drunk Kids Gaming.
If you get value out of the content you consume, please consider giving some value back, using a mechanism (like Patreon or PayPal) where you know that most of the returned value is reaching the creator who's content you consume.
The youtube algorithm and setup is really messed up, but it reminds me of the google algorithm for search.
This video shows that crap uploads and clickbait rule youtube.
I was actually fooled by these content creators and they used it as an example in their follow up video. It was really eye opening.
It feels like Slowbeef's take on this is pretty solid, but the takeaway from him seems, interestingly, to be "Hey, this is harder than people think," and not "It's no surprise people burn out or get hit with a huge scandal doing this; this entertainment channel is now oversaturated with amateur content and it's a sucker's game to play without a lot of investment."
This is so far outside my realm of experience I do not know how to read it. I have not been hearing a lot lately about the Pew Die Guy, nor do I know who the Fine Brothers are. There are lots and lots of algorithms and data structures to learn about.
Let's Plays are videos where people play video games and commentate over them.
Fivrr is a site where people can offer small services for about five bucks.
Pewdiepie is a famous youtuber who produces lets plays. He got in trouble for playing some indian men on Fivrr to wave around signs with racist messages on them on camera as part of a joke. It understandably didn't go over well and lots of people wrote angry articles about it.
The Fine Brothers produce videos where people "react" to things. So you might show a bunch of kids the twist from some movie, and show their reaction to it.
Unrelated, but am I the only one who can't believe how bad both the app and the website are from an experience perspective:
Website:
1. If my google home is playing music in my kitchen, I can't watch videos. It just cuts them off and gives me a licensing error. Instead it should just downgrade me to ad-driven youtube.
2. Most videos have huge 'annotations' that I can click off, but automatically get clicked back on for the next videos. Its usually people begging for you to subscribe to their channel. Its almost never to annotate anything and even if it was, the UX is terrible. It should be something I call up, not something that blocks the video content.
3. In-video ads. On top of the ad to watch the video I now need to be pestered with this little pop-up adds their ruin immersion. Oh I have youtube red, but I get these anyway sometimes. I imagine this is just a bug but even then they're a terrible experience for non-youtube red subscribers.
4. Audio quality is often terrible. Not sure if its the video itself but even the official music video channels usually have audio that sounds, at best, like 56k MP3 streams circa 2002.
App on Android
1. Holy hell is is slow to startup. Worse, if you accidentally hit a youtube link and try to press back, you need to press the back arrow about 3 times before it responds. Its probably my slowest app. Meanwhile an mp4 served from imgur is near instant. Heck, even a big ugly gif starts up much faster. There should be no scenario where a 100mb gif starts up faster than a 3mb youtube video.
2. Autoplay of next video means that if I'm reading the comments and if the video ends then it wipes the comments I'm reading and replaces it with the description of the new video.
3. Quality seems variable even though I'm pegged to the same 50mbps wifi connection at home with full bars.
Not to mention, the comments ranking system encourages 'hilarious' jokey comments over the more serious content. Youtube comments are usually terrible but for less popular videos they can be insightful, the problem is that the top 5 or so comments are either jokes or fairly obvious trolling attempts.
I wish someone wold disrupt this space but I imagine the deep pockets you would need to host all these videos on top of the legalities of it all means that only the top 5 tech companies would be able to compete and they're just not interested. I imagine the margins are fairly low here.
omg this. The YouTube android app is a disaster. Incoherent, poor propagation of what I've watched between devices, no obvious UI for how to stop watching a video (back button just thumbnails it so you can navigate - you have to swipe-sideways the video to actually close it), and it locks up for a long time starting up a video.
Also, the fact that vertically-filmed cellphone videos don't fill the screen when you try to watch them in portrait mode is so bone-headed it's actually funny.
I thought there was lots of good insight on how youtube pushes creators to operate at a breakneck pace, how this is at odds with what makes comedy work or not work, and how companies aren't willing or able to provide editorial support (perhaps for fear of killing the golden goose) for these youtubers, unlike traditional celebrities.
I imagine this mostly relates to the super mainstream channels that pump out content of the same quality as the random TV shows of years past. If you follow the niche channels (that are IMO more fulfilling) like mikeselectricstuff or flightchops or whoever, they operate under different rules. Their audience will seek their postings because they want the specific content.
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 channels they themselves are friends with and not focused enough on keeping engaging content and/or keeping engaged with the fans who made them money in the first place.
One factor that is rarely mentioned in this conversation is that Drama helps Youtubers - a lot. Videos about 'Youtube in crisis' gets a whole lot of views, much more than the usual standard-fare videos. This doesn't only apply to the YouTuber being targeted.
For example, assume there is some controversy over some gamer on YouTube. YouTube Channels dedicated to talking about Internet culture, like h3h3productions or PhillipDeFranco, take the opportunity to make a video titled "YouTube is Dying" with a lot of question marks in the thumbnail. They do this because videos about meta-controversies get more views than specific things. So the video gets more views, and other YouTube channels talk about the 'controversy' in order to get views themselves. Then the gamer may make a video titled "Response to YouTube controversy" which gets way more views than his average video, because it's a meta topic that everyone's talking about. And the cycle continues.
TL;DR: Controversies help content creators get more views.
"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.
Still, it does highlight how YouTube sabotages the quality of its own platform by accidentally creating pressure to post at super-high frequency. As a YouTube viewer, I'm actually quite annoyed how confusing its user-interface is. Google is so proud of their AIs that they make it extremely difficult to just get a dumb feed of "what's the latest posts from the channels I follow"? The system really wants you to explore their content and random walk until you've got some guy screaming at you about how Soros and Goldman Sachs are trying to take over the presidency.
The subscriptions in youtube is definitely broken for me. I use RSS feed for some of the channels as I was annoyed at how the notification count would not match what I had watched or not. That was a pain even with only a handful of channels.
That only works for the first video, after that it doesn't play the next video in your subscription list, it plays the next algorithm-recommended video.
There's currently no way to "catch me up to everything I've subscribed to" without micromanaging after each video.
'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 not funny -- it wasn't -- it boils down to a respected figure repeating anti-semitic talking points to an adoring audience of 14 year olds. Did he mean poorly? Maybe, maybe not. If he didn't mean poorly and it was all environmental factors, "He's just trying to make a living and YouTube culture doesn't give him time to test jokes", are we supposed to apologize for him and move on? I say he took on a responsibility and failed it, so we should be angry.
If he wants to perform for children he needs to respect the fact that his words have exaggerated consequences because he's dumping them into impressionable, insecure minds. Don't reduce me to some 'outrage crowd' and write me off when I'm concerned that a children's performer is feeding them rape & jew 'jokes'.
> 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 together on the playground, "haha, 'death to all jews', that sure was funny". After all, the life or death of a Jew, that's just a punchline.
> 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.
> 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).
The biggest real hit for PewDiePie was that Disney studios dropped him as affiliate. Disney does not feature '15+ mature', they children+parents friendly as a strategy.
They definitely shouldn't have him under the 'Disney' brand: his humor is for gamers not children. But Disney does Marvel Studios, Buena Vista, Star Wars and a bunch of other stuff.
> 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
I've read a few of the articles but couldn't find any compelling reason to be outraged. I certainly disagree with his suggestions about the police but I'm assuming all his racist facts he quoted from some major source.
It is true that assimilation is a problem and that years ago some did talk about a Reconquista. Just because some people talk or think about it doesn't mean it's a legitimate concern but it's not exactly racist to bring it up?
My friend ran a Latino media company and he used to talk about it a lot. And obviously California used to be Mexico so it's a rather common idea that's easily agreed with.
Destiny: So you don't want people to immigrate and change the "white European culture". Okay, what if you had some brown people who moved here and perfectly assimilated and embraced the culture, why does it matter if they're white or brown?
JonTron: It would be great if they assimilated... but then... eventually they'd enter the gene pool.
--
JonTron: Wealthy blacks also commit more crime than poor whites, that's a fact. Yeah, look it up.
[He provided no source for this, and I can't find anything to back it up.]
--
JonTron: These are just slurs: white supremacist, racist.
--
JonTron: We've gotten rid of discrimination in our Western countries. If you don't think we've gotten rid of discrimination, you're living in a fantasy land... Get outta here with that. People like me are supposed to listen to people like you chatter on about this oppression in America, it doesn't exist, dude, it doesn't exist. What do you want to do, police people's thoughts?
--
He also endorsed Rep. Steve King's recent tweet that "culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies", writing: "Wow, how scandalous, Steve King doesn't want his country invaded by people who have contempt for his culture and people! NAZI!!!"
I write this as someone who's been a fan for years and is very disappointed by this turn of events.
have jontron or pewdiepie ever specified that they produce children's entertainment? i keep seeing this argument brought up but i don't see how it means a hell of a lot on an open* platform with effectively no ratings guidelines. plenty of 14 year-olds used to read big brother and watch baker videos and i can guarantee you they are interfacing with far more suggestive content on a regular basis, but none of these things would be considered to cater to children even if they were the largest demographic of consumers.
If you believe being mad and outraged is an effective means of ensuring your own chosen words find their way into impressionable, insecure minds, then sure, you should be mad, Mr. Katz.
This assumes the 'outrage community' is a thing that exists and is a bunch of angry people, frothing at the mouth, waiting to attack anyone who isn't toeing their line. Maybe they even have meetings. If they do I haven't been invited. That might be because they don't exist. I believe my responses have been well measured, and the idea of an 'outrage community' is something that has been propped up to point to as a defense against criticism, no matter how deserved.
"People don't like that I'm racist? No, that's the outrage community"
"I feel attacked on all sides. Could it be that the majority of people find my ideals abhorrent? No, that's the outrage community"
In short, it's a way to pretend you are part of a silent majority, attacked by a vocal minority in the absence of actual evidence.
I don't think it matters whether the silent majority agrees with the vocal minority or not, as far as this discussion goes (and of course it is a vocal minority that is going after these youtubers -- the media is a small subset of the population). Whether their ideas are popular or not, they are in competition with these youtubers for influence over impressionable, insecure minds. So please spare me the "impressionable mind" stuff. If you get mad at someone else for using your tactics, you have no leg to stand on.
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.
That's a laudable attitude, but its feasibility is rapidly eroding in this always-connected world. Can't watch over the little angel's shoulder to see what's on their phone 24x7.
I think it is less about filtering what a kid sees and more about preparing children for the crazy shit the world can throw at kids without meaning too.
For any adult looking at PewDiePie's shenanigans it is clear that he isn't actually supporting organized racism, or if he is he is astoundingly bad at it (perhaps as bad at being funny. But to a an unprepared kid (or dumb adult) this stuff can seem shocking and the jokes might be missed on them. PewDiePie simply didn't care some kids might see and wasn't concerned about it.
Parents can prepare their kids and create open environments where the kids can ask questions. If done right the parent can create situations where they can simply explain that PewDiePie lacks good taste when the kid asks what its going on.
This is a bunch of idealist rubbish, but at least a few parents have done it.
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.
Why are you worried that your children will be threatened for their heritage in a world where children can be exposed to a diversity of opinion, including those you don't approve of? Do you think you'll lose the war of ideas to "bullshit"?
If that exposed opinion is "race x should be attacked" then kids of race x can end up attacked as result. If you convince children that it is right to attack members of race x, then other kids of race x will end up attacked. That is how it always was.
After all, nazi did won war of ideas and so did hutu and so did khmer rouge.
If you convince children that it is right to attack members of race x, then other kids of race x will end up attacked.
OK, but we're not discussing a scenario in which stormfront members have total control over what the children are exposed to. We're discussing a scenario where they have at most a few minutes of the child's attention. For the other fifteen and three quarters waking hours of the child's day, their attention belongs to their teachers or their parents. If you believe the 'racist bullshit' coming from stormfront has any chance of winning the war of ideas against those odds, that tells me something about what you think of either the quality of the other ideas or the ability of teachers and parents to impart them into the minds of children, and, let me tell you, it's not flattering.
After all, nazi did won war of ideas
Now we're no longer talking about children. We're talking about "racist bullshit" winning the war of ideas in the minds of full grown adults. If you're concerned that "racist bullshit" is going to win the war of ideas in the minds of full grown adults, that tells me very clearly what you think about the quality of your preferred ideas or what you think about the quality of the minds of those full grown adults. And again, it's not flattering.
Given that racist adults exist it is quite clear that the scenario is possible, and I think it is reasonable to assume that is a process that begins in childhood, when their minds are malleable, until finally they are old enough they cannot be swayed but can fully rationalize it, and maybe even hide between the lines in almost palatable questions like, "Is it really bullshit if it wins the war of ideas?", which assumes some kind of fair marketplace of ideas where the right thing always wins, ergo if we kill a million people here and there for the group they belong to they must have deserved it.
and I think it is reasonable to assume that is a process that begins in childhood, when their minds are malleable
Is there some defect in human minds which makes them extremely susceptible in childhood to "racist bullshit" in particular, above other ideas?
which assumes some kind of fair marketplace of ideas where the right thing always wins
Well, it certainly would always win in the minds of reasonable and just people, would it not? If you believe "the right thing" won't win in reality, is that not saying something about what you think of the people in question?
1.) Teachers spend most of schoolday not discussing racism. They discuss (and should discuss) math, physics, languages, writing, planets, birds and what not. The things the school is for. When the school has to spend more then a little time on societal issues like this, then something went wrong. Stormfront if they stand just out of school as op proposed, can have quite a lot of time with children. (They play freely outside after school are they not? They are expected to unless their parents went completely helicopter.)
Also, stormfront ideas are appealing. They make people feel sense of community, common enemy (!), purpose and feeling of strength. I think that they are immoral and wrong, but that does not mean I am going to deny emotional appeal it has especially on young.
Speaking of nazi specifically, "hardship we are going through is partly our fault plus bad luck" is less appealing then "Jews caused us to loose the war" no matter how true. "We are superior and are entitled to take land of others" has a lot emotional appeal no matter how unethical.
2.) Sure Nazi win also adults, but they were super popular among university students and youth (and young veterans from WWI having trouble to adjust back). After all, it is easier to change young peoples minds then older minds.
Popular ideas come and go while their own quality stays the same. Nazi specifically had to loose the real war to actually loose.
Teachers spend most of schoolday not discussing racism.
OK, but we're still not talking about a remotely even amount of time. Not to mention that teachers are authority figures, have an extremely captive audience, can punish incorrect opinions, and have near total control over the material children are exposed to during the school day.
They make people feel sense of community, common enemy (!), purpose and feeling of strength. I think that they are immoral and wrong, but that does not mean I am going to deny emotional appeal it has especially on young.
So then you believe there is a defect in humans which results in them having a natural susceptibility to these ideas in particular, and as children humans need to be carefully insulated from these ideas or it will be very difficult for them to reason their way to other ideas as adults. Is that a universal human defect, or one that is found particularly in some class of human?
I'm worried because my children will have the same Jewish heritage I have, and while it is not likely reason will lose the day, it is possible. Even a slim chance is worth taking very seriously. It's like giant, apocalyptic asteroids. Odds are one won't hit the Earth in our time, and if it's on track to odds are we won't be able to stop it. We're still looking out for them.
We're not exactly spending hundreds of billions each year on asteroid mitigation programs. From what I can tell, the total spending at least in the US is at most in the hundreds of millions annually. If the odds of an impact were vastly higher, we probably would spend hundreds of billions each year. If we knew an impact was coming, we'd spend nearly every cent we had trying to stop it.
Given the sheer magnitude of outrage which predictably follows "racist bullshit" being publicly displayed, I can infer, if people are acting somewhat near rationally, that they rate the chance of "racist bullshit" winning the day somewhat higher than "slim". Do you agree with that? If so, why are you worried about reason losing the day? Is it the quality of your ideas that you find lacking, or the reasoning power of the people around you?
To be clear, you are laying out the premise that by reacting to racism at all, I am revealing I secretly believe it is more right than anti-racism. Does that sound about right?
Why are you so eager to police anti-racism, then? By the same logic, if racism is right you'll be fine.
No, not quite. It's the way in which you react, which is to silence the opposition. If you believed your ideas would win reasonable minds on their merits, and you believed the minds in question were reasonable, and you yourself were a rational person, you wouldn't feel such a strong need to shut down the dissemination of other ideas. Have I gone wrong somewhere in my reasoning?
Why are you so eager to police anti-racism, then?
Sorry, where have I attempted to police anti-racism? Do you consider asking questions to be tantamount to policing thought? I've expressed no outrage over your ideas. I've never hinted at a desire to shut your ideas down at the source. I've simply asked you to defend them in a calm, reasonable conversation.
If asking you reasonable questions counts as policing your opinion, that is a very serious condemnation of your opinions.
I've already made it quite clear that I think not all the minds in question are reasonable, but you keep asking this question, like you really want to get something in it out there. Since it's not likely, then, that you are engaging in good faith, I have to go digging for the bad faith and it is not far beneath the surface.
In the end these discussions come down a fundamental moral question, outside all reasoning and apologia:
"Is racism inherently bad?" I posit that it is and no matter how you or I react to racism, no matter how many minds are swayed to or against it, it is still wrong. From the position that racism is inherently bad, my arguing against racism is not evidence that my position is weak; my belief that left unchecked racism could fester in us and cause great harm is not evidence that anti-racism is irrational and racism is rational; I'm simply arguing against something that is fundamentally wrong. You may as well ask me why I argue the sky is blue when someone tells me it is green. "Well, if you have to argue the sky is blue, how sure are you that it really is blue? The green-sky people will come around". It's strange someone would ask me why I argue the sky is blue -- you'll have to forgive me for assuming they also think it's green but are too shy to admit it.
Engaging in good faith, then, does this answer your question or would you like to ask it again?
I haven't argued that it is evidence of such. I've argued that your particular chosen method of combating racism is irrational under a few specific conditions: A) your position is reasonable and B) the bulk of the people around you are reasonable and just.
It seems like you don't believe B is the case ("I've already made it quite clear that I think not all the minds in question are reasonable.... [L]eft unchecked racism could fester in us and cause great harm...") and don't especially care if A is the case ("outside all reasoning...no matter how you or I react to racism...it is still wrong.").
Given you believe your heritage is at stake ("I'm worried because my children will have the same Jewish heritage I have"), your method is quite rational under those conditions. I wonder if your co-religionists tend to be of a similar mind.
You may as well ask me why I argue the sky is blue when someone tells me it is green.
Except you're not arguing against racism, you're arguing for outrage against racism. Those are two very different things.
It's strange someone would ask me why I argue the sky is blue
I'm not asking you why the sky is blue, I'm asking why you think outrage and censorship is the appropriate way to keep minds from thinking the sky is green. From what you've said, the answer is that A) you feel the stakes are quite high for you personally, B) you didn't reason yourself into the position that the sky is blue, but in fact believe it's outside the bounds of reason to even weigh in on the subject (I suspect you don't actually think this, but it is what you said), and C) believe a great deal of the people around you are mentally deficient in such a way that they're biased toward belief in a green sky.
Google right now is having a bit of a public relations issue with advertisers, regarding advertisements being placed in front of controversial content in Youtube. Several companies already have suspended ads.
I'm sure most mainline corporate advertisers don't want to be associated with seemingly "sponsoring" neo-Nazi content / hate speech or other extremist content (eg radical Islaimc / IS videos), which if the articles I see are right (example: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/20/trouble-b...) they sometimes do.
Managing that is Google / Youtube's responsibility. It'll be interesting what they do. The "outrage crowd" probably matters less to Google than the hit to the pocketbook, I think.
The reason this guy went on multiple racist and antisemitic tirades - including a debate where he goes off on the terrible consequences of a world where whites aren't the minority - is ~it's hard to get in the YouTube sidebar~?
Sure, but Jontron thinks it'll raise his revenue to ally with Sargon and have that tirade. He even said so. He's under the impression that the viewers who give him revenue are all white nationalists.
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 interesting case as he's far and away the biggest "real" channel on youtube (i.e. not VEVO or one of the generic youtube channels).
https://vidstatsx.com/PewDiePie/youtube-channel gives you an idea of the size, he regularly gets 5-10 million views a day!
The controversy seems very click-baity to me, I read the articles and watched his response videos. It seemed to me that he made some pretty bad taste comments (if you've seen much of his content that shouldn't be a surprise) and the WSJ deliberately sliced it up to take it out of context and produce the most sensationalised headline possible.
All reminded me of the quote generally attribued to cardinal Richelieu.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."