thread of youtubers whomst are not terrible

Australia really is Land Of The Youtuber right now, but I think "I did a thing" is now the best of all. Behold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQEIrNSPoQE

I hope the (entirely too long) new Contrapoints on cancel culture starts some reasonable discussions on the subject. probably not tho

nice, looking forward to that

GeoWizard's new series has started incredibly well btw

he truly is the last flaneur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOyWpE-Jx0A

Bryan Brutons's Prison Channel is good. Did 11 years in the Florida Prison System

I hope the (entirely too long) new Contrapoints on cancel culture starts some reasonable discussions on the subject. probably not tho

― bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.)

wrong thread

oh wait you started this thread, can a mod please change the title of this thread to "thread of youtubers whomst are now terrible", thank you

what's yer beef rusho

it would take a long time to explain and i'm not sure it's worth it (am coming to the conclusion that the nature of youtube is such that one cannot be a not-terrible youtuber, at least not while talking about politics/subscribing to "influencer" culture), but in lieu of an actually considered response, i'll just say "buck angel" and leave it at that

fwiw that controversy is discussed in agonizing detail (I was previously unfamiliar)

I thought about trying to summarize that section but there's really no substitute for just watching it, which is of course a huge part of a problem with The Discourse when it comes to this sort of thing

The US Chemical Safety Board account posts really detailed 3D animation re-enactments of chemical explosions and stuff, it’s cool.

Honestly, I don't think I'm going to watch it. I think I'm done with Natalie. I'm tired her explaining and analyzing everything at length, I'm tired of her Influencer thing where she feels like she has to speak for everyone instead of just letting people speak for themselves. I'm tired of people who praise Natalie's videos and kind of implicitly assume that she respresents the Trans Perspective and going on to ignore that an extremely large number of trans people - I can't give you an exact number, but it's not rare and it's getting less rare as time goes on - aren't comfortable with her statements, don't agree with her soapboxing. I dread the day Natalie puts out a new video because it just starts up a whole new round of arguments all over again, and in any discussion the brilliant, gorgeous white girl Influencer with the bully pulpit is going to have a certain advantage.

idk why people can't watch things, think they're fine, and have minor disagreements with parts of it

everything has to be an epic comment battle. just like, watch things at take them at face value, maybe articulate a disagreement, let others disagree

an online nation of stans

It's not really my place to parse/argue rusho's specific objections, but the video was well timed for me witnessing the shitstorm that has fallen on k@m @ust1n c0ll1ns over a dumb joke that he made and apologized for within a very short timespan and is still getting pilloried for beyond simple "do better" criticism despite having, AFAIK, absolutely no history of problematic behavior or speech whatsoever. (the whole thing went down so fast I didn't even get to see the original post!)

anyway some combo of the video and this mini controversy inspired me to finally deactivate my twitter account so that's something good

i've really gotten into this channel called "Drain Addict". it's this australian dude who has a job unclogging drains with a high-pressure water jet with various head attachments. he has minimal commentary. if you like work/process/job progress type content, or gross stuff (old sewage etc) but can't do medical body horror stuff like your dr pimple poppers or w/e, check it out! he has hundreds of videos. hundreds. combo of nasty, infrastructural and kind of asmr chill. occasional jarring australian wildlife sounds.

there's an american guy "post 10" who does similar stuff, but frankly seems mentally not all right. he really likes unblocking storm drains and culverts, but just as a very overly serious local do-gooder. lots of commentary about being ignored by city government when he calls to discuss these issues.

anyway some combo of the video and this mini controversy inspired me to finally deactivate my twitter account so that's something good

― bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Thursday, January 2, 2020 12:04 PM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

bless you for stepping into the light

feels good man

oh, man, there’s also the dude who set up a webcam for the “can opener” overpass in connecticut that slices the tops off of heavy trucks like once a month: https://11foot8.com

https://11foot8.com/speeding-semi-gets-smashed-up-at-the-11foot8-bridge/

this one is great

i saw this a few months ago, fuming

The city of Durham, North Carolina is finally raising an 11-foot-8 bridge nicknamed "The Can Opener" for shaving the tops off trucks in more than a decade's worth of viral videos. Its many fans—myself included—are mourning the loss: https://t.co/YMNL27Sgsi

— Miles Klee (@MilesKlee) October 23, 2019

deactivating your twitter account is good

natalie is smart and clever and persuasive and i'm sure she makes a lot of very good points, depending on your perspective "cancelling" can either be a howling irrational mob or the intersectional voice of marginalized peoples, it's just, i don't know, there are limits to discourse, there are limits to explaining things, there are limits to how many times i can hear someone patiently explain how i've completely misunderstood them and how unfairly i am judging them/taking them out of context. it just reminds me of all those times j.k. rowling insisted she wasn't a terf but just clicked "like" on all those transphobic tweets by "accident", and by and large, you know, it seemed like cis people believed her, and then last week everybody was all like "OH MY GOD J.K. ROWLING IS A TRANSPHOBE WHO KNEW?!?!?"

i can't speak to anything but my own experience. maybe there are trans communities where people are all "oh, cool, another contrapoints video!" like i used to be instead of "oh, god, another contrapoints video", which has, over the past year, become the dominant reaction to her videos from the trans communities i hang out in.

they locked my twitter account cos I told rupert murdoch I hope he dies this year

he should know that you want him to die, immortality is a huge burden

Damn that would have been a more productive way to cap off my twitter career

folks, folks, there are finer things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNE2y1gOVvE

second one just went up too

I will never know if Contrapoints is good or bad because fuck watching an hour+ youtube video.

I like her videos a lot but I made it about 40 minutes into this one and decided I just don't care. "Cancel culture" is for people in their 20s with way too much free time. Hearing about it is like hearing about something that was discussed for 17000 posts on Reddit one day. None of those people will ever accomplish anything in their worthless lives, because they're...on Reddit all goddamn day.

(N.B.: even the 40 minutes I "watched" were as background audio while writing.)

concision does not seem to be the praxis of "influencers" on youtube

lol, i post something here and then read like the third post here

"hbomberguy is tight with the other two youtubers already mentioned so he tends to get lumped in as well, but my big problem with his videos is they're too damn long. if you care about the politics of gaming you could do a lot worse and he is quite funny and charming at times, but he could really take a page from Contra when it comes to concision

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.)"

only thing that would be funnier is if hbomberguy was now doing 10 minute videos

I give Contrapoints more slack regarding long videos than most other youtubers because she makes a conscious effort to make her videos visually and dramatically interesting. But yeah, hour plus is a bit much.

Very proud that out of the three ppl who gave GeoWizard and mate lifts in the first video two were portuguese.

My belief is that, in the long run, there are no Youtubers who are not terrible. That communicating, or attempting to communicate, on Youtube, on Twitter, on Facebook, will inevitably make you a worse person. My belief is that there is a sort of Gresham's Law of Discourse - bad speech drives out good. My belief is that there is, in fact, "bad speech" - abuse, threats, bullying - and that its presence creates an emotional environment that renders all other considerations irrelevant.

none of the videos posted in this thread contain abuse, threats, or bullying that I can recall (I guess the geowizard guy is a little suspicious towards the farmer population)

I guess what Jon Bois does to sports statistics could be considered a form of abuse, but strictly self-abuse

last i heard youtube still had a comments section

so does the NYT. who cares?

Yeah, you'll get no argument from me that YT comments are on average worse than in most other internet places and that the platform as a whole is mostly a force of evil, but the idea that it forcibly makes you a worse person feels like it's making it too much of a monolith; there are innumerable channels that're just people nerding out over their favourite hobbies or esoteric interests, and there's not much bullying or abuse happening on them, not even in the comments.

I have literally never purposely read a YT comment other than the "pinned" one left by the channel (with the exception of the grand old Sad YouTube collection). They're very easy not to read. You can even get a browser extension to hide them forever if you like!

Sure, but if you're an *ahem* content creator I think you're more likely than not to read the comments. But those don't have to be a trash fire, is the thing.

the nyt also makes you a worse person

look, i don't know, maybe you can be like techmoan and post videos about nixie tubes and still be a healthy positive person, but if you go on youtube and talk about incels or the alt right or any of that shit that's going to cause problems for you, in the same way that doing one of those shit jobs as a "content moderator" on facebook is going to cause problems for you.

sure, i have browser extensions to hide comments, to hide those awful fucking videos youtube recommends you, and as a result i can still to some degree watch stuff on there, even though i know i probably should stop doing that.

i believe the deliberate infliction of emotional trauma and perpetuation of cycles of abuse is a key driver of "engagement" in the internet content industry's core business model.

I did watch the entire Contrapoints video although after a certain point it got to be a bit of a personal endurance test like the time I tried and failed to listen to nothing but Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion for two weeks or whatever. She made many good points and I get that part of the point was just the overwhelming nature of what it's like to be on the receiving end of the cancel barrage (via reading tweets about her for 10 minutes straight, etc.), but maybe she could have found a way to shave an hour off somewhere.

One thing that is going to haunt my nightmares is the word "truscum", the concept behind which I'm still a little fuzzy on, but which nevertheless made me shudder.

I like her videos a lot but I made it about 40 minutes into this one and decided I just don't care. "Cancel culture" is for people in their 20s with way too much free time. Hearing about it is like hearing about something that was discussed for 17000 posts on Reddit one day. None of those people will ever accomplish anything in their worthless lives, because they're...on Reddit all goddamn day.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Thursday, January 2, 2020 7:40 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I made it 20ish minutes in? Once I realized how long it was I decided I needed to get to bed. Anyway, despite your hand-waving as a young people Reddit thing I've definitely seen the phenomenon she laid out happen here on ilx, too.

Also yes some people are on Reddit all day, some people are on ilx all day, twitter whatever. I'm not sure any of us can say we're above having our faces constantly glued to internet conversations in general.

The Lockdown 23and1 guy is good on Prison stuff too, interviews a lot of people who've been inside in various states. Not quite sure why I'm drawn to this stuff

I mean, the "carceral state" in the US is fucking huge and so often subject to cartoonish / not credible representation, so it seems like a pretty normal thing to be curious about imo

carceral culture

This Contra video is mainly confirming for me that I must stay away from both Youtube and Twitter.