What's with all these awful Youtubers being popular?

Oh yes, I really loved the excellent remixes of punch a nazi. This is my favourite. In addition (I know I’m getting off topic) I think there’s a slightly under-made point about all this. Richard Spencer and Jon-Tron, in terms of the real world, are nobodies.

The story about him getting punched and the other one being what he is are bigger than they ever were. I’d never heard of Richard Spencer until he got punched. It causes him to lose some control over his image. He’s now no longer “Head of the right wing think tank The National Policy Institute, richard spencer”. Now and forever he’s “That nazi who got punched”.

I imagine something similar will happen with this guy.

What I’m trying to say is the memes in this instance are quite beneficial.

JonTron currently has 3,117,403 subscribers. That’s not a nobody.

Ugh, I’d never actually watched the original video and now I’m not sure what’s worse: being a neo-nazi or being an adult man with a pepe pin.

I hate to disagree with you but 3 million subscribers is nothing in terms of the real world.

He’s big for youtube but he’s not a household name like Brad Pitt or Bill Gates. This isn’t my point though.

My point is best summarized by this little proof:

richard spencer < (by a metric fuckton) The nazi that was punched
richard spencer = Relative nobody
jontron = Relative nobody
∴jontron < (by a metric fuckton) the douche formally known as jontron

By way of further illustration lets talk probability. Say you stop a random someone on the street and ask them for their opinion of richard rpencer. The most common response will be “who is richard spencer?”. If you instead ask about a nazi who was punched, you’ve got a higher shot of them knowing what you’re talking about.

I’m imagining something similar will happen for this jontron character.

Well I feel vindicated in preferring Danny over Jontron on Gamegrumps, though I haven’t watched either incarnation in ages.

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Name recognition among teens of live streamers is arguably higher than for what you would consider “mainstream” celebrities.

Moreso, if you add up all the popular livestreamers, you have a HUGE net influence on youth culture, and a lot of those guys are shitheads…

I don’t dispute anything you’ve said, though your being quite vague with “a lot”.

I’m going to guess that most professional streamers are decent folk but I have no data to support this just as you have no data to support that they’re, by and large, shitheads.

I’m not sure what the percentage is. The point is that even one shithead being popular with impressionable children is extremely dangerous and terrifying.

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I think that problem is that the shitheads are more easily visible.

Let’s say we have two youtubers who sometimes use insensitive language in their videos and they get critiqued about it and asked if they could maybe stop that. The reasonable one realizes that they need to think a bit more on their word choices and keep on making videos with that in mind. The shithead goes on five hour rant spewing his white supremacist views all over while crying that he is being censored and his freedom of speech is being trampled.

[quote=“Apsup, post:29, topic:562”]
I think that problem is that the shitheads are more easily visible.
[/quote]s/visible/popular/g.

The shitheadedness is one of the draws to the more popular guys. Markiplier is probably the most popular one there is who hasn’t been shitheaded.

Not that I think Markiplier is funny or entertaining… But he seems to be a genuinely good person and doesn’t set off the That Guy Detection System like Jontron/PewDiePie/AVGN/etc… do.

Another thing I think has not been mentioned. These are all people who got popular for playing video games. Many of them are popular for playing video games extremely well. There is that particular personality type where a person is hyper competitive, sore loser, etc. The best example being that one guy who we talked about being banned from LoL who insisted on playing just one character.

When those kinds of personalities mix with games, you usually get that person who is just too damn good at the game, but is a huge asshole you hate. Of course, there are lots of people who love the asshole. Still, they seem harmless because they are just involved with games.

That same personality mixed with politics gets you the worst of the worst, like those guys on TV and radio screaming conspiracy nonsense with bright red faces. Regardless of the content, we need children to be looking up to people with the personality of Mr. Rogers, not shoutymen.

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One more thing to be mentioned is that YouTube has to tread a difficult line with regards to their role as a platform. They have to remain pretty hands off because, as a platform, they can’t editorialize the content people put on YouTube too much lest they lose the protections the DMCA affords them and become RESPONSIBLE for said content. I’m sure there are folks at YouTube who are like “Hey, can’t we just take down all this nazi garbage sitting on our servers” to which the lawyers say “No. Wish we could, but we can’t”.

No. they can avoid losing DMCA protection by using the excuse that the videos violate their terms of service.

Fair point. /15characters

The “Internet Creator” camp is really getting intense against Destiny, the guy who exposed Jontron’s racism on a stream. Destiny did more streams with idiots then slipped into saying “Animators who post content on Youtube make 250k a year.” Now a lot of animators from the Newgrounds camp are jumping on this Destiny Streamer and starting to re-tweet Alt-Righters just to stick it to him.

I’m watching all this as a precautionary tale about being raised on the Internet.

Whelp Jontron released his ‘statement’ which boiled down to ‘your not as smart as me, don’t take things out of context, I’m not a racist but listen to these racist things I have to say’. What a wank pheasant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIFf7qwlnSc

Stop rewarding these people with links and views. Just go watch someone or something that isn’t poison. If you let this shit eat up even a moment of your time, that’s effectively the same as your life ending a moment sooner.

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To be fair that is a pretty good point. With some people you can have a discussion and get them to realise that they are totally off base. But for most its not worth the effort.

You know who you should watch instead of JonTron? Uncle Bumblefuck over at AVE. You’ll learn how to make shit chooch and what for makes the nice shit skookum as fuck.

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

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

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Is this the same Destiny who started as a starcraft streamer?

He’s an extremely honest guy. He’s far from being right all the time, but every position he takes he’s willing and able to explain it logically.

(Disclaimer, the last time I even heard this guy’s name was probably about 5 years ago)

Way back when he had some controversial opinions. I remember one of them was that he believed that there were no words that couldn’t be used under any circumstances.

His argument was basically as follows: Context matters a whole load. You can be incredibly racist/homophobic/transphobic etc. without using any racial/homophobic etc. slurs. The converse is also true. It all depends on what you are trying to communicate, and what the person you’re talking to understands you to be communicating.

If the person you’re talking to objects to certain words in any context, that’s fine, don’t use those words around that person. If you’re streaming and you can’t be sure what everyone interprets, exercise caution and don’t any potentially crude language.

While I don’t personally agree with this opinion. I can respect the argument with which it was put forth. Also I view it as mostly harmless as in practice, it leads you to never using bigoted language because basically everyone will react negatively.