Favorite Youtube Channels

[Hobo]

 

[LittleDaniel]

I really wanted to like that NFT video more, the problem is that crypto and NFTs are such a dreadfully dull subject compared to stuff like flat earth or bad movies, especially when you get into as much of the technical stuff like he did as opposed to the weird shit like "hey who created bitcoin anyway?"

[Hobo]

On 27/01/2022 at 22:55, LittleDaniel said:

I really wanted to like that NFT video more, the problem is that crypto and NFTs are such a dreadfully dull subject compared to stuff like flat earth or bad movies, especially when you get into as much of the technical stuff like he did as opposed to the weird shit like "hey who created bitcoin anyway?"

I honestly did find myself getting a little lost from time to time in it. Even though I liked the video overall.

Closing in on finishing my next script for youtubes. So I'll get to filming that soon.

[Hobo]

I've only watched about half of this (it's 2hrs long) so far but it's really good!  I'd long since stopped even thinking about the AVGN.

I did see some people who hadn't really/or not watched this think it was some kind 2hr dunk on James Rolfe. But it's not?  It's simply an analysis of the evolution of the AVGN, the changes in production and audience expectations. The same person also made a really great video analyzing Doug Walker's Demo Reel series.

[Hellraiser]

This is going to be interesting. I had no idea that there was any backlash to whatever Rolfe and Cinemassacre are doing because I stopped paying attention to his channel a long time ago. This is all completely new to me. 

[Lint]

5 minutes ago, Hellraiser said:

This is going to be interesting. I had no idea that there was any backlash to whatever Rolfe and Cinemassacre are doing because I stopped paying attention to his channel a long time ago. This is all completely new to me. 

Oh its been this whole thing.  Rolfe got involved with a group called Screenwave Media for a few years.  Suddenly he was no longer writing the scripts, or even playing the games, James was basically just an actor in videos

There was the plagiarism scandal.

They decided to make a weekly podcast, except it was obvious from the start that the "weekly" podcasts were batch filmed then cut apart for a weekly release

Yea, I've been following the Cenemassacre drama for awhile now...

Sadly, its currently 4:43am, so I can't watch a 2 hour long video now, but I'll be watching it later this week and will provide some comments on it

[Hobo]

23 minutes ago, Lint said:

Oh its been this whole thing.  Rolfe got involved with a group called Screenwave Media for a few years.  Suddenly he was no longer writing the scripts, or even playing the games, James was basically just an actor in videos

There was the plagiarism scandal.

They decided to make a weekly podcast, except it was obvious from the start that the "weekly" podcasts were batch filmed then cut apart for a weekly release

Yea, I've been following the Cenemassacre drama for awhile now...

Sadly, its currently 4:43am, so I can't watch a 2 hour long video now, but I'll be watching it later this week and will provide some comments on it

All of this is covered in the video.

Finished watching it last night. It is very good and very fair. You just get the sense there a  perhaps tension between how YouTube works and how James Rolfe wants to create.

Its really a video about fan culture more than anything though

 

[King Ellis]

I feel like I've said it before but the vocal Cinemassacre fans seem to very much follow that model of people not liking change. It's been like that since day 1 with that channel, people hated Mike Matei when he first started but suddenly when he leaves the channel is going to hell and it's all Screenwaves fault.

There are some legit criticisms to be made about the channel but the fanbase has always struck me as fairly toxic. Don't even get me started on that one Reddit group...

[Hobo]

1 hour ago, King Ellis said:

I feel like I've said it before but the vocal Cinemassacre fans seem to very much follow that model of people not liking change. It's been like that since day 1 with that channel, people hated Mike Matei when he first started but suddenly when he leaves the channel is going to hell and it's all Screenwaves fault.

There are some legit criticisms to be made about the channel but the fanbase has always struck me as fairly toxic. Don't even get me started on that one Reddit group...

it was all rather new to me when watching the video. I had watched some AVGN videos early on but it really wasn't something I stuck with. So I'd just never considered what is fanbase was/is. It doesn't totally surprise me though. There's a bit of a trend with early youtube video creators of this genre.

I remember from the time that Nostalgia Critic comments were pretty bad, Spoonys forums were awful, The Cinema Snob's comments sections were also quite rough. 

That's before you get into the forums where alt-righty edgelord types have entire multipage threads devoted to just hating certain content creators.

[hugobomb]

I really enjoyed that video, Lady Emily and Sarah Z (who Emily co-writes for) are both really good at deep dives into fandoms. Sarah's new video about West End Caleb is also good.

 

On 07/03/2022 at 16:36, Hobo said:

it was all rather new to me when watching the video. I had watched some AVGN videos early on but it really wasn't something I stuck with. So I'd just never considered what is fanbase was/is. It doesn't totally surprise me though. There's a bit of a trend with early youtube video creators of this genre.

I remember from the time that Nostalgia Critic comments were pretty bad, Spoonys forums were awful, The Cinema Snob's comments sections were also quite rough. 

That's before you get into the forums where alt-righty edgelord types have entire multipage threads devoted to just hating certain content creators.

Oh god I remember how bad Spoonys comment section was before he disabled it. Just utter hatred against anyone collaborating with Spoony to the point people were twitchy about working with him.

[Hobo]

as I recall, too, Spoonys forums weren't great either. I was never on them but I just remember other people talking about them online. The TGWTG/Channel Awesome fandom circles during it's peak years were a wild mix. You had the edglords, the TGWTG lite wannabe producer types (), the LGBTQ+ teens and some mixture of all the above.

I haven't seen the Sarah Z video because, tbh, I have no idea who West End Caleb is. That happens sometimes. She'll release a video and I have no idea what it's about and I'm not really keen on listening for 2hrs to find out. It's the same with Hbomberguys videos on video games. I don't play games. So I tend not to watch them really. Even though I really enjoy his work.

[King Ellis]

I can see that with hbomb, the only one I haven't watched of his is the RWBY one. Well, I tried once but just zoned out because I had absolutely no clue what he was talking about. I suppose that kinda sucks with an output schedule like his because of you're a fan and can only expect one video every 3 to 6 months, it's no good if it's in a subject you have no interest in. Though I think he's mentioned he's trying to make the videos shorter and more frequent.

I do need to block out a small portion of my life for this new Deus Ex one since it's three and a half hours long.

[Hobo]

I watched parts of the RWBY one and the most recent one.

I cant say I was completely lost because there were elements I could understand and found interesting.

I like in the Deus Ex Human Revolution video that he goes into detail on things I wouldn't think about as someone who mostly (and increasingly rarely) plays Football Manager. Like the difference between having actual choices or options that give the illusion of choice.

But I know nothing about the game so a lot of things just wash over me.

On the flipside i often find philosophy tube videos can feel a little too like an introduction to philosophy class. But i get that is also the point of her channel. i  also spent a year studying philosophy and in my Arts degree a lot of concepts she discusses were taught.

But not everyone had had the chance to study philosophy or literary and media criticism in university.

I still enjoy watching the videos though and wish theyd been a thing when i was in college. Instead we had the nostalgia critic.

[Skummy]

15 minutes ago, Hobo said:

But not everyone had had the chance to study philosophy or literary and media criticism in university.

yeah, that's my take on it - I don't think they're really for me, but if it teaches people how to properly "read" a text, I'm all for it. Much better that than either blindly believing TikTok "my Psychology professor told me X" nonsense that no psychologist has ever claimed, or the Cinema Sins/Nostalgia Critic school of "criticism" that's just angrily pretending to hate everything, and thinking that rattling off a list of faults is the same as a critique.

Funny that conversation has turned to Spoony et al - I've never really got too into YouTube, but used to watch Spoony's stuff all the time. Can't even remember how I ended up there, but I watched all his Final Fantasy 8 stuff, loved things like the reviews of Reb Brown movies and weird video games so on, that all felt very much up my street. I didn't get on with many of the TGWTG crew as they started to crossover more, but I watched some stuff by Nostalgia Critic, Linkara and Cinema Snob, because a lot of the time they were covering media I was interested in, or at least were a guaranteed short video with a few decent gags. I even toyed with the idea of getting in on the act myself, and filmed a couple of reviews, but never got round to doing anything with them.

There just seemed to be an absolute perfect storm of it all turning to shit, though, to the point that I'm always amazed when I see someone like Doug Walker, or even Linday Ellis', name surface, because it feels like they all just imploded years ago and belong to some previous age of the internet. That Nostalgia Critic is still churning out review videos to 100s of 1000s of views is crazy to me. I know he tried to move away from that character and ended up going back to it because it's all people wanted from him, but it just feels like a bit of a time capsule that people are still doing and watching this stuff when a lot of YouTube content is now far more sophisticated, or else people have migrated to Twitch for the more "Let's Play" side of things.

I just remember starting to go off Spoony, ironically, around the time he started doing videos talking about wrestling. He would upload a review of a PPV that was longer than the PPV itself, and around the same time his videos just got more and more entitled and obnoxious. I know there was a lot of behind-the-scenes drama, but he started to come across as a really unpleasant person, and I just lost any interest in what he was doing.

 

I probably haven't thought about any of this in years, but I'm being encouraged to find ways to make use of some content I've had to cut out of my book, and was contemplating whether YouTube videos might be the right format for it all, but the whole Channel Awesome scene of ten years or more ago is the only real frame of reference I have.

[Hobo]

I think that's also how I found Spoony. Likely through TGWTG. Because that was where I really got into watching these videos in the first place. Wrestle! Wrestle! was ... entertaining at first but it did not stay that way. There was a pretty clear sense that he was not a happy or well man. I have no idea what he's like these days.

Channel Awesome was always a bubble. It's collapse (and that of Blip, the video hosting site where all it's creators content was stored) did really wipe out an entire ecosystem. Once creators moved to YouTube, Channel Awesome was no longer really needed. Although this was already kinda happening with larger creators (Spoony always had his own site, The Cinema Snob always had his own site, Linkara had his etc.). Once Blip was gone smaller creators either couldn't quite sustain the hit or they conversely got more popular on YouTube or other platforms.

Leon Thomas is a good example here. Leon's show Renegade Cut was a popular but lower tier Channel Awesome show. He is on record that moving to YouTube drastically increased his shows popularity (now has 200k subs) and led to him being able to go full time. Similarly, Jill Bearup who was on sites with me is now has over 300k subs. As far as I can tell she mostly does videos about fight choreography now or something. (Jill also may or may not be a TERF)

Doug Walker was able to ride out that train because Nostagia Critic was popular and remains popular enough to keep him going.  Although the Critic and the AVGN (maybe not to the same degree?) by dint of the popularity of their character based shows they developed in their 20s are locked into those shows. They're like, I dunno, the Rolling Stones. Nobody really wants to hear the new stuff. They want to hear the hits and they can coast by simply playing the hits. I can only assume their fans by and large are fans whove been there for years or younger people who just are drawn to that kind of content.

Lindsay Ellis, while never really abandoning the things she clearly really loved talking about (transformers, phantom of the opera, disney etc) benefitted immensely from leaving CA. She went on to work with PBS, write 2 novels and get a Hugo Award nomination. She also sort of navigated herself into the otherside of that sphere and moved closer to Hank and John Green. Who, I guess, are like what Doug and Rob Walker wish they could be? The way things have ended for her is tremendously sad and really seems a byproduct of shitty online anti-fan culture.

I've really found a lot of the video creators I like through her reccomending them. People like Dan Olson, who was on CA but didn't stay very long on CA and totally flourished on YouTube, Mikey Neumann and his series MoviesWithMikey, Sarah Z, Big Joel, and Maggie Mae Fish.  While also supporting the likes of Hbomberguy and Contrapoints (whatever people may think of her in 2022 I do not know) who were really the vangaurd of I guess what they call "lefttube". A lot of whom also tend to have some academic or professional background that informs their work.

I think the only real Nostagia Critic type content I watch these days is Wrestling With Wreget. The series is openly inspired by The Nostagia Critic but is a superior show I feel because Brian Zane's clearly passionate and isn't just going through the motions like Doug often seemed to.

[LittleDaniel]

I quite liked that Lady Emily video (despite having never watched a frame of AVGN)! Went on to watch some more from her, this one

is pretty relevant to the discussion at hand. I was never a Nostalgia Critic guy, I found Channel Awesome through Lindsay Ellis and none of his cameos in Ellis's videos made me want to go check him out. So while I knew about stuff like the Critic trying to pivot away from that character and creating original content, I never knew quite how bad it was...

[Lint]

On 07/03/2022 at 05:10, Hobo said:

All of this is covered in the video.

Finished watching it last night. It is very good and very fair. You just get the sense there a  perhaps tension between how YouTube works and how James Rolfe wants to create.

Its really a video about fan culture more than anything though

 

I've always thought Rolfe would be better off if he just started a Patreon.  He wouldn't need to tweak every last part of his channel to bow to The Algorithm.  With his fan base,  he could make bank off Patreon, even with relatively low price tiers.  

I know, people here on EWB tend to dislike them because they "hate everything", but look at Red Letter Media's Patreon page.

$2, $5 and $15.  Even if every subscriber was at the $2/month level, that still over $21,000 a month.  It allows them to make videos like this (Has anyone even seen this movie aside from them?)  Their re:View series is about movies they love

Or have a spoiler free discussion about Red Rocket (Its spoiler free because of how much they liked it)

They don't care about The Algorithm.  They don't care about ads.  Their Patreon allows them to talk about the things they like

[Hobo]

Maybe Rolfe shares the same weird aversion to Patreon that the Walkers did? He's about as online as either of them.

I dunno if that has changed. They totally did an indiegogo campagin that led to a gameshow called Pop Quiz Hotshot. Which was disasterously bad in it's own way but isn't quite as well known as Demo Reel.

Although I would also say that no matter who you are on YouTube you have to cater to the algorthim at some level. Maybe that need lessens when you're subsriber levels are in the millions. I don't know.

[Toe]

5 hours ago, Lint said:

$2, $5 and $15.  Even if every subscriber was at the $2/month level, that still over $21,000 a month.  It allows them to make videos like this (Has anyone even seen this movie aside from them?)  Their re:View series is about movies they love

 

Near Dark is awesome. I highly recommend it. 

[IDOL]

On 11/03/2022 at 05:01, Lint said:

I've always thought Rolfe would be better off if he just started a Patreon.  He wouldn't need to tweak every last part of his channel to bow to The Algorithm.  With his fan base,  he could make bank off Patreon, even with relatively low price tiers.  

I know, people here on EWB tend to dislike them because they "hate everything", but look at Red Letter Media's Patreon page.

$2, $5 and $15.  Even if every subscriber was at the $2/month level, that still over $21,000 a month.  It allows them to make videos like this (Has anyone even seen this movie aside from them?)  Their re:View series is about movies they love

Or have a spoiler free discussion about Red Rocket (Its spoiler free because of how much they liked it)

They don't care about The Algorithm.  They don't care about ads.  Their Patreon allows them to talk about the things they like

You’ve not seen Near Dark?